Twitter Founder Unveils Social Search App, Jelly

Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, might have left one of the world’s largest social networks Twitter a while back but he hasn’t given up on entrepreneurism, having launched a social search app called Jelly on iOS and android.

The free app plugs into Facebook or Twitter, or both, and allows users to test the knowledge of people in their social network and answer their questions. The experience is focused around pictures in Jelly. You snap a photo in the app, add some annotations, crop, and attach your question.

Stone said in a promotional video that the project is a search engine “based on today’s technology landscape”.

“Everyone’s mobile and connected so if you have a question there’s somebody out there who knows the answer,” Stone said.

“You send your question out and either someone you know directly has the answer for you or they know someone who knows the answer and that person can answer for you, you’re helping people by answering their questions even just by forwarding their questions.”

For example, users can use the app to take a picture of a monument they are unfamiliar with and upload a picture to Twitter and Facebook to seek advice. If the user’s social friends are clueless, other Jelly users can also help. There are some additional features including the ability to draw annotations and diagrams on the photos taken.

The Jelly team claims that consulting your friends is a better idea than relying on a Google search to answer a specific query. The app pulls knowledge from your friends and their friends, working from the notion that “knowledge is very different from information”.

The Jelly app is available to download from the Apple App Store for iOS and the Google Play store for Android in the US and UK.

Stone thinks that people will be eager to help their friends on Jelly because social networks like to help, although we’re sure there’s nothing stopping the malicious among us from purposely giving incorrect answers to play jokes on their friends.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.