Introducing Jelly | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Jelly

blog.jelly.co

169 pointsuptown128 comments

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.

Is the answer to build a new social network? No.

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.

Hah, nice! Thanks for that.

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.

This is precisely the type of problem Jelly wants to solve: to get the right answer, you have to ask the right question.

Take for example this search for the statue of Anteros, in Piccadilly Circus: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=statue+in+london+with+bow

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.

>Is the answer to build a new social network? No.

Wait... I thought jelly works on top of existing social networks, no?

What exactly are "Quora-like answers"?

What's wrong with researching things yourself and getting the satisfaction of learning and figuring something out?

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.

To be sure, StackExchange is for people who don't use IRC.

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.

Also, don't forget, you can pull down the entire Stackexchange database contents, for free.

So the vast, vast majority of people then.

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.

Like others have said, this is like Aadvark. I once reminisced about it here [1].

Aadvark was really useful and what made it really good was that it tapped into your existing network. I remember being able to ask questions right from Google Talk.

I think why people are a bit confused about Jelly is because of the over emphasis on pictures. If they focus it on "harnessing your network's intelligence" it would be much easier to grasp.

They should also go beyond iPhone and Android. The desktop web is still being used (I am typing this on my laptop). It will also help people to search public questions and answers.

Right now, I use my BBM status message, Twitter, and Facebook to crowd source answers to questions such as "Please, where can I get a Sharwama at this time in the Island (where I stay)?"

I usually get a response. But to 95% of my network, the question is just noise.

It would be much better if that question could go directly to my friends who have lived in the area I speak for. And perhaps they could forward to to their friends who can answer that question.

I believe over time, they will fine tune it and de-emphasize the photo aspect. I look forward to the evolution.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752921

I loved Aardvark. :(

Best of all, it had a really good matching algorithm and would almost always get me a good 'connection'. The moment Google bought Aardvark, I knew that that was its death-knell.

As for your food questions, a few friends and I have been working on an app called "DishoomIt!"[0] but it is currently only available for Pune, India. Plans are underway for adding more cities, menus and ratings.

You have an interesting idea about geo-located question/answers. I have been thinking/working on an app along similar lines. However, my biggest obstacle is the fear that users might perceive the app's location requests to be potentially privacy-infringing - especially, given the recent uproar over 'spying' and what not. :(

Jelly's emphasis on pictures probably stems from the recent success of Instagram and Snapchat. Not sure if it was a right move but it might at least get them the initial traction and maybe that's what they are/were hoping for?

[0] http://dishoomit.com/

I think mobile is actually the perfect case for this. If I'm in front of my computer, it's not that big of a deal to fire off the five or so Google searches to find the answer to a fairly obscure query.

However, I've never, ever enjoyed doing "research" on my phone. Sure, it's okay for looking up something known on Wikipedia ("what is the population of Hungary?"). But if I have to wait through more than one pageload, squint at too-small text while furiously side-scrolling so I can read a non-mobile site, and continually fix my fat-fingered search mistakes, I'm not going to bother.

And so I think this is great. Most of the time, my curiosity isn't triggered when I'm behind a computer, it's when I'm out and about and far from my laptop.

> It would be much better if that question could go directly to my friends who have lived in the area I speak for.

Good point that. Adding real-time photos and location details to a particular query can go a long way.

The desktop web is still being used, yes, but then the use-case of Jelly seems to focus more towards hand held devices to ask queries on the go. :)

I've considered building something alongside these lines before. Imagine a minimal Google-esque homepage or app....

  Where can I get _________ in __________ ?

With questions recently asked near your geolocation shown below. Maybe you could follow people, or locations.

At least in its current form, this application has nothing to do with search and barely anything to do with questions and answers. The video is grandiose, but the actual app has little to do with the video.

At the moment, there's no way to revisit past questions, search for questions, etc. You can only swipe through questions and answers one at a time, in the order the application presents them to you.

This application is just a structured version of Twitter or Vine or Instagram, where you have to take a picture (which makes the content more interesting to browse) and other people are encouraged to respond and interact with you because the message is presented as a question.

Right now, the use case is that you are bored or lonely, so you "ask" a "question" to your friends about whatever sort of dog or lamp or restaurant or funny-shaped cloud you happen to be near at the moment. Your bored or lonely friends who are also using the app at the time respond in a general social way, not necessarily with good answers. Everyone feels good about it, and no one had to actually impose on anyone else.

It's reasonably good at this. This app provides structured social interaction, not really question-and-answer or search or access to vast untapped reserves of human knowledge.

Although presumably the app will eventually have more of those features, the focus on these features in the initial release leads me to guess that the creators understand what they've built. It may or may not be successful, but I think if it is it will be in the Twitter/Vine/Instagram/Reddit/Facebook bored/lonely space, not Google/Stack Overflow/Quora/Yelp actual-answers-and-knowledge space.

It's Web 3.0: lonely people engaging in meaningless activities with ads. Or, in FounderSpeak: "social synergies with creative tie-ins."

From a product use case perspective, Jelly is like Aardvark for mobile. Aardvark was a bit early in terms of leveraging the various social networks and did not have mobile at its heart. I was an active use of aardvark and was really disappointed when Google shut it down. Heres hoping this product takes social/mobile Q&A forward.

Agreed, clearest comparison. When Aardvark worked it really was great, and I would imagine that one of the biggest usecases for a product like this is asking questions in a new location so a mobile-first approach makes a lot of sense.

What's interesting is Facebook used to have an "Ask a Question" feature and shut it down due to lack of use.

Sometimes you need to keep striking the match until it lights.. but I don't quite get what they're fixing that Facebook's approach got wrong (obviously not the network?)

Facebook Officially Begins Shutting Down “Questions” Product: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/19/facebook-questions-shut-dow...

jig also springs to mind and this answer on Quora about why it didn't take off is pretty good

http://www.quora.com/Startups/Why-didnt-vark-com-or-jig-com-...

I think there is also an interesting embarassment factor - I felt that people did not like to be seen needing help on Jig. People that asked for help did get lots of it.

I also think the notification framework (posting to facebook would just get comments there, not on Jig; emailing people is annoying) is different for mobile rather than desktop use as well.

I still like the idea a lot so I hope Jelly unlocks the idea.

From the video it seems like it's a social network for questions.

Sorry for the negativity, but I can't see how this would work. It suffers from the same problem as every social network does, people need to be on it. If I want to get responses from my friends instead of just googling it, I go to my biggest social network Facebook to get those. I just don't see any value in this, it doesn't solve a problem any better than the current alternatives do.

From the page: "Jelly works with your existing social networks."

My understanding was that it works as an addon to facebook or twitter or whatever. Maybe one of the creators is floating around here and can clear this up.

Seems like the landing page is full of fluff. All I see are feel good sentences about helping each other, Albert Einstein, etc.

The big down side is this: "“What’s this?” That query is submitted to some people in your network who also have Jelly".

I have +400 friends on Facebook. Out of those, maybe 3 will install Jelly to try it out. Even with taking friends-of-friends taken in to consideration, it's just a very limited set of people. Would I really want to use this app to post a question that I can probably find answer just by looking a map, doing a google search or posting to Facebook/Twitter?

> In a world where 140 characters is considered a maximum length, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

What a silly world these people live in.

I'm following a lot of Twitter and other SF tech people on Twitter, and I had tons of questions waiting. Maybe it will stick for a some people, but indeed, I don't think most people have enough questions to check this kind of app often.

I believe it implements Facebook Connect and the Twitter Followers API, as with nearly every startup since the social networking boom in 2008.

EDIT: The app uses friends of friends on Facebook, and also the Twitter Followings of your Facebook Friends.

So instead of asking my social networks by just asking them, they're trying to convince me I need another app installed to be able to do what I can already do?

This is a solution solving a non-existent problem.

Some people create solutions for existing problems and others create new ways doing existing tasks.

This falls into the latter. Coming from Biz Stone you shouldn't be that surprised. I'd be shocked if his start up was solving a well known and critical pain that is immediately obvious.

It's not just Biz Stone (is that his porn star name?); there is other soulless cream cheese with hair:

http://jelly.co/about

In a way, sure, but not entirely. Jelly offers a way to forward questions along to others in your network, so it helps extend peoples' networks beyond their first degree connections. It is also purpose driven, your inquiries aren't mixed up with selfies and game announcements or family drama, presumably.

you mean, like, retweeting them?

I ask people questions all the time on twitter, and frequently get useful answers. In turn I often RT my followers own questions if I don't know the answer.

I'm sure Jelly will have other benefits, but in this respect it just another unnecessary layer on top of twitter for me.

I think it's more direct than a retweet, but you're right that it's just another layer. That's not to say that a purpose driven layer can't be useful/grow into its own right. Twitter was just a layer on top of SMS at one point.

I love trying new products and experiencing the on boarding process. It's always very interesting for me to attempt to understand the root problem a new product is trying to solve and the steps they use to help explain that to you.

I don't understand Jelly. I downloaded the app, attached my social networks, and the app told me to ask a question (while the camera was on, which was kind of intimidating). I didn't have anything to ask, so I closed it out. I was then taken to a screen which says I was all alone and that I needed to invite my friends to try Jelly. Why would I invite my friends to try out a product I've never used?

I think Jelly will have an issue with gaining users as well as keeping them. There is a strong use case for asking questions which has a photo attached, but not much of one for answering those questions.

Anyone have a different experience?

>While the camera was on, which was kind of intimidating

Felt the same way. There should be a homescreen of sorts when launching the app (e.g., an aggregation of all the questions you have asked. If none, then place a prompt to "ask a question" which takes you to the camera).

Looks like the next iteration of http://fluther.com which Ben founded: http://www.fluther.com/users/ben/

I am an aspiring photographer. I have a photo of my kid that doesn't look great. I don't know why or what settings to tweak to make it better. I don't know which of my friends-of-friends are good photographers. And I'm not that interested in joining online photo forums.

Posted on Jelly and within a few mins I had a couple great suggestions.

This is a great use-case that google and wikipedia can't help me with.

Wasn't Aardvark on the path to doing this?

And I think that it works exactly like Aardvark did. Strange stuff. I don't think that this could be useful, since hard questions will be unanswered, and easy questions shouldn't be handled by humans either. So I guess this kind of application shouldn't be really used, and instead we would need large, compact databases, where we can store and query quality knowledge.

I thought the same thing.. Google bought them, then shut them down the next year. Citing bringing the Q&A features over to Google+.

Always "stumbled upon" or "came across" some idea. Never "spent years of rigorous market research" or "cross pollinated a bunch of existing ideas."

I'm just not sure I have those types of questions -- ones more easily solved by my network than by Wiki or Quora. The video uses local art identification as an example, but I can think of a few different ways I'd solve that problem to have an answer in a minute or two.

Am I missing something? What problem does this solve?

Just tried out the app, other relevant questions I've seen:

- What kind of dog is this?

- What kind of plant is this?

- What do you think of this outfit?

- Where can I buy this lamp?

Ah, interesting. I do have those questions sometimes.

Facebook had a very similar product launch in 2010 called "Questions." It not only distributed to your friends, but actually used graph data to surface to niche experts in the space of the question (similar to quora). That product flopped around for about a couple years before it was killed due to lack of valuable engagement.

I agree with what Biz is saying - "knowledge is very different from information." But I think the problem is that a lot of information already has knowledge layered on top of it in the form of indexed and searchable web objects, so for mundane questions like the example used, encouraging people to share the answer instead of retrieving it from an existing source is just wasted energy.

To me it seems like a slower human version of Google Goggles, I even tried it with their example in the video[0] and Goggles was able to tell me the result faster than a human, I understand that this will not work in all cases, but it's likely (in my life at least) that Goggles will know more about objects in the world than the collective knowledge of my friends (we don't leave Wales much).

[0] http://i.imgur.com/ch3uRMm.png

Also, without sounding like a Cretin, I don't really want Jelly to succeed because I dislike Bono so much. (Bono was a seed investor, or series A investor to Jelly)

I don't really want Jelly to succeed because I dislike Bono so much.

You sound more like a pathetic child.

Ahh, name calling. I seem to remember calling my brother names a lot when I was a child...

Interesting team composition; 4 managers, 1 designer and 3 engineers. Is this normal?

It's a little out of normal, mostly because they were able to hire phenomenal people right away. And I don't think that 4 managers is a fair description. None of them fit the PHB mold, and all of them have different specialties that they can make very solid individual contributions to.

Only if you think you're going to grow exponentially (and have the capital to do so)

Read the blog post and still didn't quite understand what it is.

The awkward, redundant writing really doesn't help.

I think I understand what it does, I'm just not quite sure why. Their example use case of "what is this?" with a picture is handled pretty well by Twitter or Reddit if the object is at all interesting or unusual.

As far as I can tell, it's basically a modernised version of Yahoo Answers.

At last, I can use my social network to answer the timeless questions, like "HOW IS BABBY FORMED?" :)

To me the main issues revolve around "wrong" or opinionated answers:

eg: ask jelly if dietary fat is bad? depending on your circle you'll get a different answer. Lots of nutritionist friends trained in the 70s? you'll get tonnes of "yes" answers. Lots of friends who follow the high fat diet ideas (see: http://www.dietdoctor.com/science ) you'll get lots of No answers.

And this is the rub, to the extent that your friends are homogeneous, is the extent that this just becomes an echo chamber of potentially misinformd ideas.

One of googles advantages is that I get information outside from of my circle and bring it (with me) into my previously uninformed circle.

> No matter how sophisticated our algorithms become, they are still no match for the experience, inventiveness, and creativity of the human mind.

Well that's pessimistic. Especially when it comes to recognizing images, which machine learning is well-disposed for.

I though the same thing.

In fact, with each passing year the more I'm convinced that "no matter how far our minds have gotten us, they are no match for a well-engineered algorithmic model running at light speed on mountains of data".

What if your network just isn't that smart and well-informed? This works in SF where a lot of people are walking, talking encyclopedias, but what about elsewhere in the world?

This seems like it's going down the same path as Quora.

I think this is cool, but I think the true power of this really is in the answers bit. Wouldn't it be cool - after getting engagement from a few thousand people taking pictures and asking questions - to snap a picture of something and have the answer pop up automatically without asking the question?

If they did that - i.e. compare the photo to other similar looking photos - it would reduce a lot of redundant questions and also make it immensely powerful. At that point it isn't a social network anymore; it's a collective intelligence search engine.

But I doubt they'll do that.

So they are right in assuming that people are searching more and more for answers to questions rather than looking up documents containing keywords. They are wrong in assuming that all of these questions inquire about what some physical object/location/etc is. But I think having something like this is useful in other ways. One application that comes to mind is that they could gather all submitted answers to build an automatic object/scene recognizer. Probably in a few years, Jelly could automatically tag objects in the photo you just took.

> build an automatic object/scene recognizer

That's a really hard problem. Google has millions of labelled images and look how well Google Goggles is working...

True, but I would think that since photographs taken by Jelly would a) most like be close-ups and b) might also have some extra annotations (eg. circled objects, hint in the question). This would result in a training set that better suits real world input. I am not really sure to be honest, it's just a thought.

>look how well Google Goggles is working Nicely for buildings and arts, but YMMV

This is a good idea. I would just like to be able to ask questions without using the camera, and to have a favorites list that would make it easier to email or text the URL to the question.

Surprised that no one has mentioned the other side of a program - Answering the questions.

Yes, cool, a guy walking in unknown city, takes a photo, and gets personalised answer from a friend.

On the other side: a guy doing something more than meaningless, gets a mobile notification that his friend asked for the knowledge he knows about. Sounds like a perfect distraction - any time, any place, requires an action taken.

Taking stackoverflow in comparison, user is not delivered with random questions in random periods of the day.

Looks nicely designed and maybe fun to use, but I can't imagine (and the website certainly doesn't help one imagine) a reason for using this instead of Google other their one provided use case of taking a picture of some unknown object and asking the community what it is.

Even with that, you could just post that photo and question directly to facebook, thereby cutting out this app which seems to serve as a middleman between a user and his or her already existing social networks.

How strong is Quora nowadays such that a competitor is necessary?

More than anything else, I want to see one of the developers using their own product and being passionate about it. Instead, it feels like they're pitching me on an idea - which I can't for the life of me see the point of.

Reminds me a little of Kevin Rose's Oink: http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/14/2872172/oink-app-kevin-ros....

Does Jelly feature Stack Overflow-like gamification? At least some form of gamification (e.g., a visible karma score) seems the default today for any platform for questions and answers; I haven't install the app but I saw no evidence of it in the screenshots. If they chose to not have it, I wonder why that could be (the boring answer would be "probably because MVP" but there may be other, more interesting, ones).

Is gamification necessary? The fact that the questions you see are posed by friends is maybe enough incentive to answer.

I'm using the app now and I see that I have "0 thank you cards." That seems like it might be some kind of points system. We'll see once I can get someone else to install the thing.

Trying to register with Twitter, get the error: "Error creating user". Can't even use the app, bad first impression.

Edit: same thing with Facebook.

"This app is incompatible with all of your devices."

Seems that Android Jelly Bean support is patchy. I've got an HTC on 4.1.

About a year ago I came across a funky looking insect and found my answer by going to http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/. I then wondered if someone would create a site just for this purpose. I guess Jelly is what I was thinking.

I can't even create an account. Get error creating user when trying to connect to my twitter.

I was quite distracted by the "Murder she wrote" motif which kicks in at 0:23 on the video.

What pain point is this solving? I can see the usefulness of the photo of the Spire example, but as for traffic / most other real time issues, FB and Twitter work for those.

Honest review of the video: very boring, cliché and didn't convince me to download the app after watching it. I wasn't sure wether I should post this or not (sorry for being negative) but I guess it's better than no feedback.

Cool project! Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)

Didn't Aardvark do this already and get bought by Google?

I wish there was a webapp, seems iOS or Android only for now.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Seems like a Tinder'd UI for answering questions on a modernized Yahoo Answers/Ask Jeeves with a Quora effect.

Seems like it needs a lot of permissions on Android, e.g. reading SMS messages. Not sure it relieves a pain point enough to give that kind of access.

Jelly is all about the photos. It exists because people are far better at recognizing objects in images than computers are... for now, at least.

How is this different from http://www.localmind.com/ ?

What's up with the typography and it's spacing on this site?

To me the font is too dark & large, as well line height is needed.

Would fit Google Glass pretty well.

Also: Take a photo, have friends vote on something. Example: "Should I buy this?"

Problems 1)I do not have a Facebook account 2)I am not making money by using this app.

I guess it's a search engine powered by social network. That's it.

Didn't Yelp do something like this before switching business models?

No offense intended, but this is a pretty useless title.

I'm sure the name is cute and easy to remember, but if there's no other info, gives me little reason to give it a second thought. (My first thought was it was some sort of a social network surrounding Candy Crush)

I think it's a play on the word "jell", which (as a verb) can mean "to become clear, substantial, or definite; crystallize"[0].

[0]: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/jell

In fact, the example at that link is even more telling: "The plan began to jell once we all met to discuss it."

HN guidelines dictate that a post take its title from the linked article. And given that the linked article in this case was a blog post on the website for the app in question, it does make a little sense, doesn't it?

In this case, the title from HN is merely a symptom of the underlying issue with the blog title, etc.

I'm sure you're referring to this guideline: "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

I think that if the title is so minimal as it begs you to click to have a clue what it might be, that could be construed as linkbait.

I think maybe he was referring to the company/app name - not the title of the blog post or this submission to HN.

Unless I 100% own my 'answers' and my social network won't be sold, I won't use this.

I see there being value as an open source project, but if this is just a way to monetize and mine me and my friend's opinions then jelly can go jump in a lake.

When you give advice in person, do you establish a contract with the person you're talking to that establishes control over the information you just shared?

I'm being a bit facetious but unless the things you are answering are things that only you know the answer to, it's a bit silly to demand some sort of ownership over what usually amounts to basic knowledge.

Clearly, an aversion to mining in general is a fair argument against, but even if it were open source, third parties would mine it and use it for their own purposes, at least when you go directly with a company like this, they are beholden to their terms of service, and privacy policies, which I am sure is no consolation :)

Yes, because you should get everything for free.

No, this is not the expectation at all. Software developers should be paid for their work, but (sorry Hacker News) of all the popular funding models "VC-funded free service"(1) is the most hostile towards its users.

1 http://dominictarr.com/post/71958587606/some-thoughts-on-the...

I think it's about data-ownership, not price.

if you "100% own" your answers, how does the site have permission to display them to other users?

Terms can be drawn up so that you 100% own the content, but you grant the site a license to display your content on their site alone (and possibly indicate it must be only shown in original context, their search results, etc)

This allows full intended use but not ability to sell your answers to marketers, repackage as a book, etc.

Or they could go entirely in the other direction, and make all content on their site Creative Commons.

Wow, this is a nice mobile phone. But I didn't see any specs.

Are these guys stoned?

Why is it mobile only? Feels strange to exclude web users.

Btw how do you plan on preventing spams and adult content?

I have a question, where are the questions and images stored? I suspect in some database for the NSA to get their grubby hands on.

Why can't this be built on p2p tech? oh I forgot, we are all mainframe developers now...

is this a new kind of 'search' engine? No.

is this a search engine at all? No.

is it built for acquisition and using its users as a product to sell much like instagram? Yes.

Well done on the logo. It's very nice.

Goggles?

Crowdsourced Goggles!

What if your friends are bumbling idiots or sarcastic bastards? I can already see it now "Hey guys, what are these two round concrete mounds near the ocean?" friends: "Huge tits? idk wtf, google it".

I give it 8 seconds before it's all penises and people saying various things are dicks.

And a lot of "is this a growth"? "Does this look infected?"

I miss Aardvark.

Please don't take this as discouragement. To Intelligent people at Jelly : Please spend you time and effort on something useful or fun.

For more info about the product: http://blog.jelly.co/post/72563498393/introducing-jelly

That's the exact link I submitted that you're replying to.

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