Twitter co-founder's next venture could be a Q&A service

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has a secret. He’s founded a new company named Jelly that will be yet another addition to the Q&A services on the Internet.

Stone had been teasing the service for a while now. In a post on the company blog titled “What is Jelly?” Stone wrote “Jelly is a new company and product named after the jellyfish. We are inspired by this particular animal because neurologically, its brain is more ‘we’ than ‘me.’ Also, for the past 700 million years, this decentralized structure has been wildly successful,” dropping subtle hints that the company has a lot to do with crowd-sourcing but saying nothing more.

According to a report by The Verge, the answer to the question, “What is Jelly?” lies in another company Stone had been a part of. The common theme between these two companies is not just Biz Stone, but also Jellyfish. The company named Fluther – that’s what they call a group of jellyfish – is what the base of Jelly will be, according to rumours.

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Another Q&A platform?

Fluther itself is a Q&A based startup where Stone was an advisor. The service was acquired by Twitter back in 2010 but still remains operational. Fluther is in the ranks of crowd-sourced Q&A services like Quora and Aardvark that have been providing a platform for people to ask and answer questions.

What Stone plans to do now is take core ideas from Fluther and refurbish it to serve mobile devices. It is unclear how much of its service Jelly plans to base on Fluther, though. A person acquainted with the plans told The Verge that the team relates the product strongly with Fluther and is still trying out a range of different approaches towards the mysterious new service.

Fluther essentially allowed questions to be routed to users in a personalised fashion. These were modelled to be based around the user’s expertise. Each question, according to the service, had to “feel like its own chat room”. You could also follow a “fluther” of people for interesting questions and answers.

While this sounds like a premise of any other Q&A based website like Quora, it looks like Stone could add a unique touch to Jelly’s services. Stone is joined by yet another man of experience, Ben Finkel, who joined Twitter when Fluther, the company he co-founded was acquired. It was under Finkel’s able leadership as an Engineering Manager of the Growth Team that Twitter went from serving 50 million users to 200 million plus.

While there is no indication that Jelly could be ready any time soon, we can’t help but feel intrigued about the next-big-thing the former Twitter wizards are working on.