Mediaboss Marketing

Social media watchers are paying close attention to the launch of Jelly. No, its not a new culinary sensation. Its the latest social app conceived by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Now, theres nothing about Jelly that suggests it will become a cultural phenomenon like Twitter, but theres no disputing its pedigree.

Jelly currently only supports two social networks. But, hey, at least they're the big ones.

Simply put, Jelly is an image-based information engine that taps into your social networks.

Lets say you want to know the species of a spider that just bit you. You take a photo of it, then share the image with your Jelly friends along with the query, WHAT THE HELL JUST BIT ME?!? Through the magic of social networking, your friends will theoretically provide an answer. And if they dont know the answer, maybe some of their Jelly friends will.

To get started, youll need to install the Android app, which can be found by searching for Jelly Industries in Google Play. After launching the app for the first time, it will ask you to connect your social networks; current options include Twitter and Facebook.

Once your networks are connected, you can begin asking and answering questions to your hearts content. Youll be presented with questions posed by anyone within your extended social network, which includes your Facebook friends, the people you follow on Twitter, and the friends of your friends on these two services.

After youve established your social network connections, Jelly catapults you into the Point. Shoot. Ask. screen. The interface activatesyour devices camera, urging you to take a real-time photo to accompany a question.

Alternatively, you can click on the photo icon in the bottom left-hand corner and select a pre-existing image from your device. You can even select an image from the web via Google Image search.

To submit an image-based query, you first shoot an image or grab one from local storage (left), and then type the question you want attached to your picture (right).

After youve selected an image, you can rotate it, crop it, or use it as is. Jelly constrains images to a virtual square shape, saving them at 1088x1280. Presumably, this is done so that images will fit well within the apps portrait-oriented design. Landscape mode isnt supported in any part of the Jelly app.

Read more:
Jelly for Android: Diving deep inside the new image-based Q&A app