I’ve been having some fun this morning with Jelly.

Jelly is a new mobile search service announced yesterday that works via apps for Android and iOS. The company was co-founded by Biz Stone, one of the original founders of Twitter.

So what is Jelly?

In a nutshell, it’s an app you use to ask a question about something, such as the one about Starbucks mugs you see in the screenshot, where you show a photo of a mug you take with your phone’s camera.

You ask the question of those in your social networks – the app currently lets you sync with Twitter or Facebook – and anyone who sees the question can offer an answer. You can quickly give thanks to those who answer, and share the Q&A publicly on the web via Twitter or Facebook.

The app has some simple editing capabilities for the photos you take: you can crop them, for instance, or add lines and circles with your finger to emphasise or highlight an aspect of your image.

Jelly has certainly captured some imaginations if my experience earlier today is any indicator. Once I’d installed the app, synced it with Twitter, and asked my first question, interactions started happening at quite a pace as these reduced-size screenshots from my Galaxy S4 suggest.

It reminds me a bit of Quora, the text-based Q&A service on the web where you ask questions and get replies from the crowd. Jelly is mobile and uses pictures.

The service has just gone public and the Android app I used is clearly a version 1 in terms of features and what you can do with it. The questions come as a firehose – I can see no means right now of filtering who you can see, something I would imagine would come in a later version, along with other features, based on user feedback.

The old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is quite apt for Jelly. Snap a pic on your phone, add a short question, and hit ‘send.’ No need for a thousand words!

There are so many instances of a question forming in your mind where typing it out often isn’t easy (or even practical tapping on the screen of a mobile device) as you’re not quite sure what the actual question is. Showing a picture makes it very easy to frame the question.

Take my example of the USB connector I mentioned earlier – far easier to show a photo of it and ask what it is then to try and describe the connector and ask what it is.

Imagine the possibilities also for business. For instance, a visual gallery about a product showing common questions with the answers provided by users, fans, anyone who has an answer. Hashtags will be key here. I imagine things like an API will come to enable more sharing opportunities of the content resulting from all those photo Q&As.

I think Jelly is a neat offering and I’ll continue experimenting with it. Try it and see for yourself what Jelly is all about.

(Via TechCrunch)