What is Jelly?

That’s the question that the tech world has been mulling over since March of this year, when Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced that he was close to launching a new startup, called Jelly, which was being pitched a “native mobile” app.

Since then, we’ve seen the launch of a Jelly blog (on April 1 – we’re assuming this isn’t all a big joke), news on Jelly staff and investors (which includes former Twitter cohorts Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Kevin Thau and Jason Goldman) and even a Jelly logo.

Still, the question remains: what is Jelly, and what exactly will it do?

Well, The Verge has done some digging, and it looks like Jelly might be a Q&A site. Yep, another one. Here’s the skinny: back in 2010, Twitter acquired a Q&A startup called Fluther. Fluther (which rhymes with “brother” and “mother”) is a word used to describe a group of jellyfish. Fluther’s site, which runs under the tagline “tap the collective”, and features a character called Dr. Jelly, uses a proprietary algorithm to push personalised questions to users based on their expertise and experience. Users can follow “fluthers” of other users to tailor their feed.

When Twitter acquired Fluther they picked up founder Bin Finkel, who switched to working at Twitter, and in April joined Jelly as CTO. The same Jelly, of course, which uses a jellyfish as a logo. And is called Jelly. And then there’s this, from Biz’s original post about the new venture:

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.”

More “we” than “me”. More about the collective than the individual. Collective wisdom. Crowd-sourced knowledge.

Q&A.

Film at eleven.