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Are you ready for this jelly? ; Website of the week When is a search engine not a search engine? When it's a social network for searching through... [Bristol Evening Post (England)](Bristol Evening Post (England) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Are you ready for this jelly? ; Website of the week When is a search engine not a search engine? When it's a social network for searching through your friends' eyes. Giles Turnbull looks at Jelly. If you had to build a brand new way to search the internet, starting from scratch, where would you start? What would you build? Those were the questions Biz Stone and Ben Finkel asked themselves while taking a walk through San Francisco. It occurred to them that the search engines we're used to, including market leader Google, were all designed in the days when desktop computers ruled the internet. For today's young people, those days are ancient history. Their computers don't sit on desks, they move around. Very often, they don't use "computers" at all, but tablets and mobile phones. So Stone and Finkel decided they needed to build a search that takes advantage of this mobile technology, and the constant interconnectedness that comes with it. The result is Jelly (www.jelly.co) and at first glance it's, well, a bit odd. Its creators say it's a way for you to ask your friends about stuff you encounter. Snap a picture, share it with friends, and ask them "What is this thing?" or "How do I fix this?" Your friends can supply their own answers, or forward your question to other people they think might be able to help. Yes, you can already do this with a simple email. Or even a Tweet. That's partly why Jelly will seem odd. But install it on your smartphone and give it a try. Although it's very early days, there's something compelling about flicking through the conversations happening there. Similar conversations could never happen by email, because everyone hates email and you'd be accused of spamming, and they wouldn't happen on Twitter because they'd be too long. Jelly might be strange, but perhaps Stone and Finkel are on to something. After all, strange worked pretty well for Twitter, and dozens of others. (c) 2014 ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved. |