Calling it an “un-pivot,” Biz Stone is bringing back Jelly, the Q&A app he created in 2013. Launching today, the new and improved Jelly remains close to its roots, but with an added twist. This time, everything is anonymous so you can ask what you really want to know.
Referring to the new Jelly an “on-demand search engine,” Stone said that one lesson he learned from the original Jelly was that people didn’t necessarily want to ask questions to their social network. “Would you want your Googles to be your tweets?”
Some might draw similarities to Quora or Yahoo Answers, but Stone is hoping that this Jelly will be an alternative to Google.
“We think the future of search engines is just ask a question, get the answer,” he added. It’s “ten or 15 minutes you didn’t have to spend looking around on links.”
Users can sign up to answer questions on Jelly. People can rate whether responses were helpful. If someone receives a lot of positive feedback on a certain topic, they are more likely to be selected to answer future similar questions.
The new Jelly is optimized for mobile, but will also be available for desktop searches.
Jelly was founded by both Biz Stone and Ben Finkel in 2013. Backers included Spark Capital, Greylock, Jack Dorsey and Bono.
Says Stone of the change of plans. “We made a rookie mistake. We got talked into pivoting” Jelly into an opinion-sharing app called Super. So the Jelly co-founders decided to go back to “our original dream, our original vision.”