Building on the concept, “If you have a questions, there’s somebody out there that knows the answer,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and former Twitter colleague Ben Finkel have launched Jelly, a social search app that uses your social networks to deliver results.
According to the announcement today on the company’s blog “Jelly is designed to search the group mind of your social networks — and what goes, around comes around. You may find yourself answering questions as well as asking.”
Claiming to be a “new way to search,” the app can be downloaded from iTunes or Google Play. Users submit questions within the app which can then be answered by anyone in their existing social networks. Questions can also be forwarded outside of the app, opening up queries to a much broader audience. Beyond simply submitting questions, the app lets users perform searches using images:
Biz Stone is listed as Jelly’s co-founder and CEO alongside co-founder and CTO Ben Finkel. Finkel was the co-founder of Fluther, a Q&A service that was acquired by Twitter in 2010. After being acquired by Twitter, Finkel worked for Twitter managing new user experience on the social network’s growth team.
While Jelly claims that the algorithms of today’s complex search engines are “no match” for the “experience, inventiveness, and creativity of the human mind,” it’s worth mentioning an entire catalog of social Q&A solutions – Ask.com, Quora, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers and even Facebook – have all failed to succeed in this social search segment.
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