Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone revealed his top-secret new startup Jelly, a mobile app that enables users to ask short questions of their social network through pictures. For instance, Stone snapped a photo of an art piece in San Francisco, asked his network what it was, and got a few dozen answers. 
 
 Since this morning’s announcement, there’s been a swirl of confusion and criticism about Jelly, especially because it seemed odd to limit an information utility to short questions within one’s own relatively small social network. 
 
 But, after speaking to Stone, it appears that Jelly has a much more unique and ambitious purpose than we’ve come to expect from web utilities. The primary goal of Jelly is to increase empathy, and is built more for the answerer than the asker. 
 
 “Using Jelly to help people is as much more important than using Jelly to search for help. If we’re successful, then we’re going to introduce into the daily muscle memory of smartphone users, everyone, that there’s this idea that there’s other people that need their help right now. 
 
 “Let’s make the world a more empathetic place by teaching that there’s other people around them that need help.” 
 
 To be sure, Jelly is still a utility. I successfully used it this morning to answer a math question: 
 
 The same could apply to asking about what to wear, where to travel, or how to decorate one’s room. In one anecdote, COO Kevin Thau’s niece solicited some art advice for an acrylic painting, which eventually got forwarded all the way to the art director of a friend and director of TV’s House, Greg Yaitanes. 
 
 “That art director answered it brilliantly,” he gushes. “In what world does a 14-year-old girl in Florida get a professional answer from an art director?” 
 
 Success for Jelly is about creating a comprehensive question-and-answer network that users tap throughout the day, especially in their downtime, such as while waiting in line at the grocery store. 
 
 “All these people are working on artificial intelligence. How about just intelligence? There’s 7 billion people; there’s a lot of intelligence out there.” 
 
 But, the search engine seems almost instrumental. Biz’s stream-of-conscious explanation is worth quoting in full: 
 
 Beyond being a very useful search engine, like I said before, it creates this circle of empathy, where people realize that ‘Oh, there’s other people who need my help and I can actually help them and they’ll feel good about it and they’ll get trained to thinking about helping other people. And, maybe that’ll even jump outside of the app and just into the real world and they’ll start looking around and helping people and wouldn’t that be great? 
 
 With this, the format of Jelly makes more sense. Offering knowledge in an instant is the shortest path to helping. Jelly is explicitly discouraging discussions or any long-form back-and-forth. Just quick answers, a shot of personal dopamine, and off to the rest of the day. 
 
 Jelly is the first major application that I’m aware of to be built for the person helping, not the one seeking help. It’s this counterintuitive proposition that makes Jelly so intriguing. More importantly, Stone is no stranger to wild success. Few would have ever thought Twitter would become a staple of modern-day media. 
 
 Yes, Jelly is ambitious, but it’s being directed by someone who has the track record to actually make it happen. It’s new territory, and we’ll be following his grand experiment. 
 
 “We just kind of increase that global empathy quotient just a bit in our lifetime, and wouldn’t that be great?” 

 Twitter cofounder Biz Stone is taking another crack at changing the world. 
 
 Stone and a seven-person startup launched a question-and-answer style social networking app on Tuesday called Jelly, available for free on iOS and Android. The app asks users to submit questions alongside a picture captured from their phone's camera. 
 
 See also: 10 Best iPhone Apps of 2013 
 
 Connections from the user's Facebook or Twitter accounts can then respond to the question through the app. 
 
 "In a world where 140 characters is considered a maximum length, a picture really is worth a thousand words," Stone wrote in a post on Jelly's blog. "Images are in the foreground of the Jelly experience because they add depth and context to any question." 
 
 Users can respond to a friend's question with a link, by drawing on the original image, or simply using text. Users can also forward questions using text message — so in theory, you don't need to download Jelly to help your social connections gather answers to their questions. 
 
 The app provides a service that already exists on a number of other platforms, including Twitter, the company Stone helped build (he left in 2011). Other sites, like Quora and Ask.com, already focus exclusively on question-and-answer style interactions. 
 
 But Stone said that Jelly was built with the expectation that users will help answer your questions — a feature other social sites like Facebook and Twitter aren't primarily used for. Jelly's mobile-only approach enhances its functionality, Stone added. 
 
 Jelly was born out of Stone's passion for helping people; he believes the app can make an act of kindness relatively simple. After leaving Twitter, Stone spent time pondering how the world operated with so much connectivity. It was then that he stumbled upon the idea for Jelly with cofounder Ben Finkel. Prior to Jelly, Finkel cofounded Fluther, another question-and-answer service that Twitter acquired in December 2010. 
 
 "I was trying to imagine, 'What is the true promise of this newly, wonderfully connected society?'" Stone said in an interview with Mashable. "The only thing that I can think of that makes the most sense is people helping each other." 
 
 Jelly's future may rest on two aspects of the app: the algorithm used to determine which users see which questions, and the information Jelly is bound to accumulate if users adopt the app. 
 
 The questions asked aren't shared with all of a user's social connections. A simple algorithm — jokingly referred to as the "Finkel Rank" after the cofounder — surfaces questions to the most relevant audience, Stone said. This algorithm will improve over time as the app collects more data on users and should help improve Jelly's functionality. 
 
 Stone says the company is "more about knowledge than information retrieval" at the moment, but sometime down the road, popular questions will likely populate with answers within the app itself. A database of questions and subsequent answers could also help Jelly gain a foothold among its competitors. 
 
 Stone has been working on Jelly for almost a year since diverting his full attention away from the startup incubator Obvious Corporation, where he worked with fellow Twitter cofounder Ev Williams. Stone provided the early funding to get Jelly off the ground, but collected a round of capital in May from an impressive list of angel investors including Twitter cofounders Williams and Jack Dorsey, former Vice President Al Gore and Bono. 
 
 Jelly announced a permanent office in San Francisco in November. The app's name was inspired by jellyfish, which have "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," Stone wrote in the blog post. 
 
 Image: Andrew Burton/Getty Images 

 For nearly a year famous person Biz Stone has dramatically teased us with his mysterious new app. He told us the app's name -- Jelly -- and little else. 
 
 The tech world grew giddy with anticipation. Stone, you see, is one of the cofounders of Twitter -- another app with a funny name. It's now worth billions. 
 
 Finally, on Tuesday Stone let us in on the secret. And Jelly turns out to be a ... a search engine? 
 
 Sort of. 
 
 Jelly is a new, free question and answer app for iPhones and Android phones. The app allows you to ask friends and friends-of-friends questions. You connect Jelly with your Facebook or Twitter account (or both) and then you take a photo and ask a related question. 
 
 The Huffington Post spoke to Stone by phone on Tuesday and asked him about the hype around his app, which has intensified in the months since he wrote a mysterious, vague blog post announcing his new venture. 
 
 Stone was modest about the all the publicity: "Because of Twitter I've gained notoriety, so that's given it a boost," Stone told HuffPost in an interview. "It's a blessing and a curse, because when we've been working on it we couldn't do it without anyone watching." 
 
 Jelly is also backed by some big names, including Bono, Al Gore, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Twitter co-founders/entrepreneurs Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams. The company is still small (there are eight employees) but Stone expects the app to be profitable, since, as he says, it's "a new way to search" and search is a good business to be in. 
 
 Sure, it's a good business to be in theoretically, but it's a business that belongs to Google. If Jelly wants to challenge Google, it would have to revolutionize search. 
 
 Here's how Jelly works: Say you're walking along and see a building your don't recognize. With Jelly, you would take a photo of the building and upload it, asking "What is this building?" In theory, at least one of your friends or someone in your extended friend group would know the answer and respond to you. People need to have Jelly to be able to see and answer questions, but you can forward a question to someone who doesn't have Jelly if you want his or her help. 
 
 It's hard to imagine what sort of question you'd prefer to ask Jelly instead of Google or a close friend. Although Jelly just launched, the app's 50-or-so beta testers tended to ask three specific types of questions, Stone told HuffPost. Those questions were: "What is this?" "Is this good?" and "How do I fix this?" 
 
 Because a big part of the way Jelly works is based on its camera feature, these sorts of questions tend to work out well. "People would take pictures of the back of their TiVos and other people would come in and circle the right plug," Stone told HuffPost. 
 
 The difference between asking a question on Jelly vs. asking it a regular social media app like Facebook or Twitter "comes up to expectation," Stone says. "People aren't expected to give you a thoughtful answer on social media." On Jelly, however, the whole point is to get questions answered. 
 
 If Stone wants to know if the hat he bought his 2-year-old would be good for blocking out the sun, and he posted a photo of his son in the hat on Facebook asking if it was a good hat, he wouldn't get direct answers, he says. "I'd get answers like 'He's so cute,' or 'He looks just like your wife,'" Stone says. On Jelly, he argues, he'd get direct, thoughtful answers from people. 
 
 It's not as if he couldn't use Google and Facebook to get the answers he's looking for, though. If he were to Google the best sun hats for toddlers he'd find hundreds of reviews. And if he were to ask a straightforward question on Facebook without including a photo of his son, he'd probably get better results as well. 
 
 The concept behind Jelly is nothing new. Sites like Quora, Ask and Yahoo Answers have all been offering ordinary people ways to ask and answer questions from all over the world. There are two main differences, though, (besides the ability to attach a photo), that Stone pointed out. One is that the people you're asking are all "trusted" sources, since they're all connected to you in some way. The second is that Jelly, unlike a site like Quora, is built around getting answers efficiently. "We're explicitly going away from encouraging discussions," Stone told HuffPost. "It's more like a search engine." 
 
 The goal of gathering direct answers to questions isn't always obtained, however. For example, I saw one person who posted a photo of a dog on Jelly and asked what kind of dog it was. Out of the 18 answers I read, not one was a legitimate answer. Most people wrote that the dog was "cute" or "sleepy," when the person was clearly looking to determine the dog's breed. How can you blame anyone, though? That person was probably better off doing a reverse image search on Google or searching on Google with a description of the dog's appearance. 
 
 I also encountered someone on Jelly who asked what sort of fish a toy he photographed was meant to resemble. "Google 'unicorn fish,'" someone answered. Unfortunately, Googling defeats Jelly's purpose. 
 
 Besides building a business, obviously, Stone's goal with Jelly is to "create a way for people to help each other." 
 
 "I can't help but think that now that humanity is at its most connected in history: What is the point of a connected society?" Stone philosophized to HuffPost. "The true promise of a connected society has got to be people helping each other."
– Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has released a new app, and he's hoping it will "make the world a more empathetic place," he tells TechCrunch. Available for free on iOS and Android, Jelly allows users to ask questions accompanied by photos; responses come from users' Facebook and Twitter networks. In an example at Mashable, a user asks, "Worth reading?" with a picture of a George Orwell book. TechCrunch writer Gregory Ferenstein, meanwhile, got a reply to a complex math question. Similar services are out there already, but Jelly is more focused in the idea of users helping others, Stone says. "Using Jelly to help people is as much (or) more important than using Jelly to search for help," he notes. "If we’re successful, then we’re going to introduce into the daily muscle memory of smartphone users, everyone, that there’s this idea that there’s other people that need their help right now." The Huffington Post notes that the service—supported by the likes of Bono and Al Gore—has challenges ahead. Information-gathering is "a good business to be in theoretically, but it's a business that belongs to Google," writes Alexis Kleinman.