Are Biz Stone and Ben Finkel reviving Fluther with Jelly?
Asked by
aakash (
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)
July 19th, 2013
The definition of a fluther is a group of jelly fish.
Biz said it was an idea that “they couldn’t get out of their heads”
They said it was about people helping each other.
Is Jelly a new version of social search?
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9 Answers
No. Not that I have any real info. The unfortunate choice of nomenclature does confuse things. But we are talking lapdogs and zebras.
@aakash Welcome to Fluther (or Jellyville if you’d rather). Thanks for an interesting opening question. Is there some recent activity on the part of the founding team that suggests they are actively changing things or redefining the group in some way?
@ETpro On the part of which founding team? My thought process – Ben Finkel founded Fluther, he is now working on Jelly with Biz Stone. Naming aside, both products are based on the hypothesis that people are inherently good and are willing to help others.
Ben Finkel, such an amusing sounding name, rather like an oddball comic book character.
No. It seems to be a twist of the idea.
As @hearkat said, we’ve discussed this recently (and the answer was “no”). Jelly is a separate project altogether, but I believe it will use some of our technology and the community aspects of Fluther.
Welcome, by the way!
Inquiring minds are waiting to learn more.
The answer is that we kind of are. Although we’re not planning on shutting down Fluther. In fact, we just upgraded Fluther to be much faster and have no ads.
Here’s the long story. I was an early advisor to Fluther when Ben co-founded it. I helped them raise money and advised on product. When Twitter acquired Fluther in 2010, the service itself, Fluther.com, was specifically carved out of the deal.
When I found out Fluther was cut out of the deal and in jeopardy of being shut down, I created an LLC and bought out Andrew, Ben’s co-founder. So right now, Ben and I own Fluther.
We came up with the idea for Jelly (askjelly.com) in part because we were thinking about what to do about Fluther but also in part because we wondered what a search engine powered by people would be like, and could it be better in some cases than web search.
So now we’ve got askjelly.com, an iOS app, #askjelly on Twitter and three browser extensions (askjelly.com/extension). We’re hoping that there will be some happy overlap between Fluther and AskJelly, even though there are differences.
More to come!
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