A year ago, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone dropped hint about a new application that he is developing, This week he finally launched it - to mixed reviews. This was largely because people can't seem to figure out what it's for, and how it will enhance their lives.
Twitter, which is now worth billions, had a specific role in changing how people connect with the world. Jelly, on the other hand, is not so clear.
Jelly, with its tagline, "Let's Help Each Other," is a platform that allows people to take a picture, upload it with a question, and have friends and friends-of-friends answer the question. For instance, you are at a flea market and you spot a vintage dress that has the label cut out. You can snap a photo of it, upload the photo onto your Jelly page, and ask, "Who designed this vintage dress?" The answers might start to pour in while you are still at the flea market, or they might not, but it's doubtful if you will base your purchase of the said dress on the replies you get.
A more useful example, though, would be if you get a flat tire and have to change it yourself, and you don't know exactly where in the under-chassis to place the jack, and you post that question on your Jelly page. The answers could potentially be very helpful. But still, the premise is that if one has a working smartphone in the event of such a mishap, one will tend to use the said smartphone to contact a mechanic or a garage instead of try to deal with the mishap oneself.
Jelly's usefulness is indeed sketchy. But there is a high possibility that marketers will find a way to take advantage of this platform, and turn it into a tool for business, as they most often end up doing on social media.
According to the company's founder, Jelly's brand name is based on a jellyfish because it has a loose network of nerves that act as a 'brain' similar to the way we envision loosely distributed networks of people coordinating via Jelly to help each other."
In an interview, Stone explained that Jelly is better than social media at getting answers and it "comes up to expectation." "People aren't expected to give you a thoughtful answer on social media," he said. On Jelly, however, the whole point is to get questions answered. That quite effectively places Jelly in a special niche, similar to Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Cha Cha.
The dependence of Jelly on images also rides on the popularity and heavy usage of image-sharing platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat, and of course on the upsurge in manufacturing, marketing and sales of smartphones with better and better cameras, plus the decreasing cost of cellphone data plans. "Photos are what make mobile, mobile. Without cameras, smartphones would just be little computers," Stone said.
Jelly is backed by, among others, big names like Bono, Al Gore, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Twitter co-founders/entrepreneurs Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams. This could be more because of Stone's clout than the actual intrinsic usefulness of Jelly. But then again, in this day and age where nothing is what it seems, perhaps we do need platforms like Jelly to give us the answers.
