I look at lots of new tools, and 'Jelly' has been making the news recently. Jelly was founded in April 2013 by Biz Stone (of Twitter fame) and Ben Finkel. It's supposed to be a new search engine that brings people together, and lets them connect and share stuff. It's basically an app that you put onto your smartphone, and if you have a question, you take a photograph, ask your question and then throw it out into the world, hoping your contacts will be able to provide you with an answer. To be honest, if this had been produced by anyone other than Biz Stone it would have sunk without a trace. Because it's bad. Not only is it bad, it's pointless.
First of all, it's an app. Nothing wrong with apps and I use them all the time - but it's nice when there's a desk/laptop version as well. Just having something that runs on one platform really isn't a great idea, irrespective of the platform, because it's closing out a lot of people who might otherwise use it. Secondly, it's not a search engine because... you can't freakin' well search! All that you can do is mindlessly flick from one photograph to another, trying to find something that is of interest. Third, it's not useful - sure, if I want to know something I can post my question, and it relies on people seeing the question and then spending their precious time answering it. It's serendipity gone wild. Fourth, I have to append a photograph - I can't just ask a question. What if I don't have a photograph to use? Something random and pointless is required, which again doesn't help matters.
Fifth and finally, Jelly is a pointless answer to a question that we don't need to ask. If I need to know something, I'm going to ask on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Quora, where I am not restricted to adding in a photograph, and I can share my question widely, and properly engage with people who want to answer the question. If I need to know what something is while I'm out, I'll use Google goggles on my smartphone to see if that can tell me. If something is particularly urgent, then I'm not going to have time to post a picture, wait for responses that may never come and then act on them.
Jelly is the worst of the social media applications that are out there - expecting to engage people simply because it's not something else, because it's backed by a big name, and because it uses a smartphone app to do its work. It's a total waste of time and it's not going to catch on; it'll be dead in 3 months, but will limp along for a year before it gets put out of its misery.
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