Jelly Supplies Crowdsource-Powered Image Search
February 10, 2014
Here’s a new way to search from one of the minds that helped loose Twitter upon the world. The Los Angeles Times shares an interview with a Twitter co-founder in, “Biz Stone Answers our Questions About New Q&A App Jelly.” Forget algorithms; this app lets you take or upload a picture and pose a question about it to other humans, both within and outside your social-media circles.
Stone and co-founder, Ben Finkel, started with a question: if we were to design a search tool around today’s online landscape, as opposed to the one that existed about a decade ago, what would it look like? As the app’s website explains, “It’s not hard to imagine that the true promise of a connected society is people helping each other.” (Finkel, by the way, founded Q&A site Fluther.com and served as its CEO until that service was acquired by Twitter in 2010.)
One of Jelly‘s rules may annoy some: users cannot post a question without including an image. Writer Jessica Guynn asks Stone why he incorporated that requirement. He responds:
“We did a lot of testing and more often than not, an image very much deepens the context of a question. That’s why we made it so you can either take a picture with your camera and say, ‘What kind of tree is this?’ Or you can pull from the photo albums you already have. Or you can get [a photo] from the Web. Photos are what make mobile mobile. We are really taking advantage of the fact that this is a mobile native application…. Everyone is carrying around these great cameras. It’s a uniquely mobile experience to pair a short question with a photo. It might frustrate a few people in the long run but it will only end up with better quality for us. There is a higher bar to submitting a question.”
The image requirement is just one way Jelly differs from Twitter. The team also worked toward making the new app less conversational in order to avoid the clutter of non-answers. (And we thought 140 characters was limiting.) We’re curious to see how well users will warm to this unique service.
Cynthia Murrell, February 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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