Jelly Encourages Ongoing Dialogue, Adds 'Replies' To Its iOS App
by Joe White
June 17, 2014
Jelly, the question-and-answer iOS app created by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, is hoping to keep the conversation going through its recent addition of "Replies."
Now, users of the app aren't limited to posting a question or an answer in response to a question. Instead, users can reply to answers, offering additional information on the subject at-hand or developing the original topic into something new.
In a post added to the Jelly blog, co-founder and CEO Biz Stone explains:
People are brimming with extra information, opinions, recommendations, questions about questions, and more. Not everything fits nicely into a formal question or specific answer. So today we’re launching a more freeform way to help share what you know in the form of Replies. Any answer on Jelly can be replied to and the replies are public. This can help clarify the original question, add more context, turn into a conversation, or, well, who knows. That’s the beauty of a freeform feature like this. Our attitude is let’s launch it and see what it’s best for.This is definitely a nice addition to the crowdsourcing app, and one we're pleased to see reach Jelly. If you're not familiar with Jelly, the free application allows users to post a question from their iPhone to Jelly's user base. Social integration, however, makes it possible for users to have their Jelly-asked questions appear on Twitter and Facebook, and users can even forward queries on to others who don't have the app installed in order to increase the chance that a question doesn't go unanswered. Photos can be linked to questions, and these can be added using the built-in Camera app, the Photos app, or Google Images. For those pondering the app's name, however, my colleague Aldrin Calimlim provided the answer to that particular question in his original article on the application:
In case you’re wondering, Jelly owes its name to the jellyfish. It’s so named because, as noted by Stone and company, the animal 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.”Jelly 1.3 can be downloaded now on the App Store, and it's optimized for the iPhone and iPod touch. [gallery]
