Jelly's First Week: An Outside-Looking-In Data Analysis

I've been struggling to put in to words what exactly I think about Jelly, and I'm intrigued but underwhelmed at the same why, and here's the reason: Jelly seems to be (to me) the product of the Silicon Valley filter bubble.

Here is my use-case:

- I do not live in a huge city, but it's decent size (greater metro area is ~400k, city proper is around 50k-80k).

- I do not live near a large "hip" tech center (we have tons of tech in the area, but it's mostly military contractor engineering sorts of stuff).

- Many of my friends are not technical people, and so don't tend to fall in the early adopter category.

- Tangentially to the not being technical part, many of my friends are the sorts of people who don't use Twitter because they don't "get it".

- I don't use Facebook.

- I work in a field dominated by academics, so a lot of my colleagues and the sorts of folks I meet at conferences, etc. tend to be the type of people who don't use Twitter/early adopt new products as well.

- I use Twitter, but due to the stuff above most of the sorts of people that I follow are people that I've never met who do fall in to the categories that I don't fall in to; they live in NY or SF or Boston, they run in a tech-forward-thinking crowd, etc.

Jelly doesn't work for me. When I open the app, it's flooded with a bunch of stuff that's super specific to these tech-hub areas and full of people that I don't know (and who don't live anywhere remotely close to me). The overwhelming popularity of the "Who is this?" question (which is also a little creepy) is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The few people I've met that do use the app walked away with the same opinion; there's nothing there for them.

Here's the thing. Jelly seems like an awesome idea. But it reminds me a lot of Oink and Stamped, which also never really took off. I loved those apps and tried my hardest to get the people around me to use them but I couldn't because there was no community for them there. These ideas are so interlocked to the startup scene filter bubble that it's really hard for them to gain traction with every day folk that have slightly more mundane lives, like me. I wish I knew what the solution was because these ideas are always so cool, but I just don't.

I mentioned in a post that I submitted to HN yesterday [1] that Jelly's mission of relevant questions is somewhat flawed because Jelly insists on showing questions from strangers that are frequently very stupid. There's no incentive to help pure strangers with such questions. ("thank you cards" are not an incentive).

Also, Jelly has some baffling UX decisions that have led me to stop using the app (the biggest one is that it's impossible to delete questions/answers).

[1]: http://minimaxir.com/2014/01/farcical-friends-of-friends-fol... (HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7051357 )

I used to use Aardvark https://web.archive.org/web/20110812083048/http://vark.com/ and their service was actually pretty decent -- responses were near to 100% provided you didn't ask anything too technical. If it was something that could be answered with general opinion like "where's the best burger in SF" it worked great. That said, Facebook does the same thing.

"All data was collected via my own Jelly account using publicly accessible (if undocumented) API endpoints"

Can someone explain how this was done?

I don't see the point of Jelly.

Limited format (image and a little text). No incentives to answer. As with most things people will spam and ask stupid questions.

As far as getting a question answered nothing beats Quora right now.

I wish they will succeed. However, those knowledge database are always going to be hard as knowledge is a moving and asynchron entity. What I mean is that something that is true today may not always be true. Also, if a group learns something through jelly, that knowledge isn't propagated to all the the people using jelly which can lead to a lot of duplicates. I hope the moderating will be good. On the other hand, an iphone app can provide a lot of information and context about the question which might help Jelly show questions related to the place/time. Quite a hard problem indeed.

"While the dropoff on the 11th and 12th could be explained away by the weekend (a typical lull for social activity), the continued downward trend on Monday the 13th is concerning."

I disagree with this, I have many app in the App Store, including apps that are in the "Social" category and usage and downloads always spike during the weekend. I've never seen an app where usage goes down during the weekend.

Best analysis I've seen so far on the platform. I have to admit: I like the platform, but many questions that are asked there don't get the serious thought they deserve. (There are also a TON of dumb questions on the site.)

Am I the only one thinking that the results are pretty bad (yeah I know, one week only). But, what I understand: no user engagement, bad questions, not enough answers.

Nice idea, but what this metrics says to me is: time to pivot.