Biz Stone appeared on Bloomberg Television today to talk about Jelly. Bloomberg is sharing the interview, which gives us some insight into some possible directions Stone and his team may take the app in.
Users have been wondering who all sees the questions that they are asking. It’s not everyone in their networks.
“Well, not everybody,” said Stone. “My co-founder’s name is Ben Finkel, and we’re jokingly referring to this as Finkel-rank. What we’re doing is we’re taking all your social networks – now just Twitter and Facebook – we’re blending them together into one network and we’re sending your query out to a percentage of those people. And so, not everybody, but some of the people you know got that question.”
You would think that search would be a key feature of a Q&A service like Jelly, and it may be eventually. Stone told Bloomberg that this may come later, and that they just don’t have that much info to search through yet.
Jelly has indicated that more features are on the way.
Search actually may be the key to monetizing Jelly.
“I mean, right off the bat, just the fact that we’re thinking of ourselves as being in the search business, I think there’s a lot of opportunity,” said Stone. “It has been proven that is a good business to be in. It sounds strange to anyone in the business world, but it is kind of cart before the horse when you are dealing with this kind of business, because you really need to build up that base and prove that there is value before you can really begin to think about how you want to offer more value in the form of revenue generating products. So, we’re holding off, but we think there’s a lot of opportunity in the search space, mainly because there is an intent. When somebody comes to Jelly, they want something. And whenever somebody wants something, there is usually someone else who wants to get their attention.”
We’ve already seen how brands can help out people on Jelly, so yes, there’s a lot of potential.
Image via Google Play
