Picture this: you’re walking downtown and you notice a camera crew and film trucks parked across the street. Curious, you fire up your Jelly app. You snap a picture of the scene, drop a pin of your location, and ask, “What’s filming here today?” Within minutes, 2 friends within your social network answer and let you know that your all-time favourite actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, is in town filming his new movie, “Oscar Hopeful”. 1 nearby user even lets you know that Leo is doing a fan meet-and-greet a block away from where you are. Score!
In January 2014 Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone unveiled his new question-and-answer based social networking app and pseudo search engine, Jelly. The app makes use of today’s hyper-connected society by helping users find answers to their questions by mining their social networks for opinions. Users snap a photo (and can draw on photos Snapchat style), type out a question, and then receive real time answers from connections in their social networks and from other nearby users. All queries must be accompanied by a photo, which can be generated from a Google image search, taken from your phone’s Camera Roll, or snapped at the moment of questioning.
So why use Jelly to search for answers instead of Googling your question or posting it to Facebook? According to Stone, there are many every day questions that can’t be answered with your typical search engine. “No matter how sophisticated our algorithms become, they are still no match for the experience, inventiveness, and creativity of the human mind,” Stone shares on Jelly’s blog. “Jelly is a new way to search and something more–it makes helping other people easy and fun.” In addition to receiving personalized human opinions rather than computed information, using Jelly allows you to reach a much larger audience by connecting through Facebook and Twitter. Since the app is still in its infancy, its reach will continue to grow as it forms connections with more social sharing platforms.
As we often discuss in the Digital Tattoo Project, there are countless ways of connecting with others online. The Jelly app is an excellent example of the extreme connectivity of our society and how online participation is very much a two-way street. Will you be joining the Jelly community? Why or why not? Do you have any privacy concerns regarding the use of this app?
Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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