Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone just can’t get enough of the big time – so he made another app called ‘Jelly’, and it hasn’t got anything to do with dessert.

It’s a mobile app that allows you to ask short questions of your social network through pictures. So, as an example, you could take a picture of a food item you’ve never seen before – ask your network on Jelly what it is, and get an answer.

It was announced yesterday to a crowd of fairly confused tech journalists. Why would you limit an information utility app to short questions within one’s own relatively small social network?

But, after speaking with Stone, they realised just how ambitious the new app is. The primary goal of Jelly, Stone explained, is to increase empathy, and is built more for the answerer than the asker.

Using Jelly to help people is as much more important than using Jelly to search for help. If we’re successful, then we’re going to introduce into the daily muscle memory of smartphone users, everyone, that there’s this idea that there’s other people that need their help right now.

Let’s make the world a more empathetic place by teaching that there’s other people around them that need help.

It’s a utility app – and it can be used in very imaginative ways. In one anecdote, COO Kevin Thau’s niece requested some art advice for one of her paintings, which eventually got forwarded all the way to the art director of a friend and director of TV’s House, Greg Yaitanes.

Thau was enthralled:

That art director answered it brilliantly. In what world does a 14-year-old girl in Florida get a professional answer from an art director?

[Source : Tech Crunch]