Review of Jelly: Ask and ye shall receive

For an app that only came out a couple of weeks ago, Jelly is currently considered one of the most popular and social apps out there. This should not be surprising, as the app was headed by Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, but its immediate and rising flood of users is certainly an achievement to be admired. So what makes it so popular?

In short? It's an easy, fun way to ask random questions and essentially avoid responsibilites.

Me avoiding my responsibilities

For those who either have not tried or have not heard of the app, Jelly is a Q&A app designed to give users answers to their questions through their social networks. It’s sort of like a bizarre cross between Snapchat and Facebook.

Here’s how to use it: you provide the app with your Facebook or Twitter contacts, snap a picture, and then send that picture off with a question. Your social media contacts, and friends of your social media contacts, and their friends, can see the picture and respond with an answer. They can even doodle on it much in the same way as Snapchat.

Essentially, it expands your social network and turns it into a giant think tank, for such dire questions as “what should I have for lunch?” and “exactly how hideous is this tie my wife bought me?” and “do you think mixing vodka and tequila is a good idea?” (You should know the answer to that last one, and yet this exists anyway because clearly somebody has demons in their liver they need to kill). 

The brilliance of the app lies in its simplicity: it can be a place both for weird, random questions as well as serious inquiries. When you see an image and its attached question, you can either answer it, forward it to a third party, or just shrug and give up, all options displayed on the bottom of the photo:

Watering it might help, dude

While you have as much chance of getting an answer as you do whenever you ask something of the Internet—about a fifty-fifty ratio of helpful and devastatingly or hilariously unhelpful replies—people are flocking to Jelly, for the simple reason that it’s fun.

All in all, I wouldn’t count on the app to rock your world, but it’s certainly good for a few laughs. And if you can’t decide what to have for lunch, why not let the friends of your friends' friends decide for you?

Source Mashable