You guys are really predictable. You act as if the founders never considered existing networks/solutions, that they just shipped a useless app without any thought. Whether it'll become a hit remains to be seen, but open your minds just a teency-weency bit to try and understand what these guys are doing.
I see a lot of things around this city that I'm curious about, but haven't the faintest clue about how to start researching them. And even if I can find an article or two online, there is a massive amount of valuable contextual information that's usually missing, unless I scour the web for obscure blogs. For instance, what are those little people statues at the 14th St. 8th Ave. subway station? A google search doesn't return anything immediately enough for me. And many of these questions are spur of the moment. So posting a picture with a question is significantly better in capturing in-the-moment curiosities.
But why can't you post to Facebook or Twitter?! Because I have tons of questions that I'd rather not bombard my friends with. And because the chances of getting just a reply go up the larger the network. If I can tap into the minds of my friends' friends, why not? FB and Twitter are not platforms for asking questions. There's a reason why you never get Quora-like answers. Or why you aren't connected to people who're likely to have the answers you're looking for. There are fundamentally different use cases between FB and Twitter and Quora, and perhaps now Jelly.
So please stop acting thick and think for a second why this might be a little different. Yes, you can ask friends for answers. Yes you can search Wikipedia. But do they have all the answers? Are there types of questions they're just not suited to handle? Can the answers be more rich? Can getting those answers be easier and more enjoyable? Maybe.
Funny, your phrase "what are those little people statues at the 14th St. 8th Ave. subway station" returns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Underground as the first response for me, which I assume is what you are looking for. It seems that many of the examples are just location based information that is better served via map.
I never bothered to search that exact phrasing of the question. When I initially went looking I used a few phrases that didn't turn up anything. It seems like "statues" or "sculptures" are the operative words. Try "decorations" (which is what I tried), and you won't get the same result. Getting the phrasing just right is an unnecessary hurdle. Had I posted a picture to Jelly, it would've spoken for itself.
So considering my failings, I actually see this exchange in favor of Jelly or a service like it. After all, it was you, someone part of my social network, who gave me the answer I was looking for, not google.
Conversely, I bet posting a photo to Jelly would get me an answer. And it only becomes more likely that my friends (and their friends) will find an answer easier than I can the more obscure and difficult to search for the subject is.
Search engines are getting much better at interpreting the question you wanted to ask from the question you actually asked - "Did you mean..." - but they still have a way to go before they can do a better job than a human.
> Is the answer to build a new social network? No.
I don't see why not. Quite a few of my friends are leaving social networks these days, mostly due to the lack of a specific purpose. I.e too much non sense. So I can totally see hooking up to new social networks that have specific purposes that accommodate my needs. I don't have an immediate need for this one right now, but I'm not adverse to trying it should I come across a situation where I do.
I think that's going to be one of their hurdles. You're not going to hear of it and say "YES, I've always wanted to google stuff for people all day, let me download that!". You're going to wait until you have a question that you can't quite answer and then download it and ask, only to find out that out of your group of friend you're the first to hear of it AND have a question you can't google.
Nothing if you have the time. One of the reasons I love Stackexchange is because its an aggregation point for domain-specific knowledge that doesn't fit into a Wikipedia sort of model. I hope Stackexchange grows into a Wikipedia-esq peer of sorts.
There are rarely questions that I'm willing to wait undefined amount of time to get an answer to, if the other option is to use little more time to get the answer right away. When I'm on the road, which seems to what Jelly is targeting, I'm interested in things right there. E.g. "I'm hungry in downtown Seattle, what's a good sushi place?"
I wish Jelly luck, but for questions like that the first app that comes to mind is Yelp. It's going to take Jelly a lot to push them from the top of that hill.
I don't know if it will take a lot. Yelp seems to me to be in a fairly precarious position. Localinfo sites are highly dependent on data-entry, and the industry and its users have recreated these databases over and over in the past 15+ years. Usability and relevance is key, and no site has solved that problem yet.
IRC conversations aren't googlable after the fact (I'm aware of channel loggers but they don't solve the problem, not really).
Every time I get really deep into some new programming language or tool or technology I hang out in the IRC rooms for it for a bit to see what the common questions are. Within a few days I become a primary answerer of questions because everybody is asking the same questions and I can deftly answer 90% or more of them, even knowing very little about the technology in question.
When you have a question, the first thought you should have is that somebody has asked this question before. Not that there should be an IRC room or a forum or a subreddit or a red phone waiting for your beck and call. Frankly this sort of self-centred "SOMEBODY ANSWER ME NOW" complex strikes me as selfish and the last thing I want is a social network founded on the idea of tracking me down to ask me things that can be answered with very little real effort on either of our part.
Stack Exchange encourages this selfish behaviour (pls send me teh codez), but at least it gives us with the Power of Google a way to access other peoples' selfishness, which is nearly the best of both worlds.
While i like that you are supporting the product, and i applaud you for that. And your bits about twitter and FB make sense. But, when you say you want "Quora-like answers", well my first reaction is "why not use quora?". Isn't that the same thing? you post a question, and people answer it.
I was trying to say that someone could simply use "why not just use FB?" as a way to dismiss any new service built on a social network. I could've easily said that when Quora first launched. But now we see that Quora fills a particular niche that FB doesn't seem to excel at. Similarly, we may see Jelly carve out a corner for itself (whether it's for "spur of the moment answers service" or otherwise), a corner that FB may have overlooked or is just not currently built to handle properly.
I see a lot of things around this city that I'm curious about, but haven't the faintest clue about how to start researching them. And even if I can find an article or two online, there is a massive amount of valuable contextual information that's usually missing, unless I scour the web for obscure blogs. For instance, what are those little people statues at the 14th St. 8th Ave. subway station? A google search doesn't return anything immediately enough for me. And many of these questions are spur of the moment. So posting a picture with a question is significantly better in capturing in-the-moment curiosities.
But why can't you post to Facebook or Twitter?! Because I have tons of questions that I'd rather not bombard my friends with. And because the chances of getting just a reply go up the larger the network. If I can tap into the minds of my friends' friends, why not? FB and Twitter are not platforms for asking questions. There's a reason why you never get Quora-like answers. Or why you aren't connected to people who're likely to have the answers you're looking for. There are fundamentally different use cases between FB and Twitter and Quora, and perhaps now Jelly.
So please stop acting thick and think for a second why this might be a little different. Yes, you can ask friends for answers. Yes you can search Wikipedia. But do they have all the answers? Are there types of questions they're just not suited to handle? Can the answers be more rich? Can getting those answers be easier and more enjoyable? Maybe.