Jelly for Fashion

Point, shoot, ask!  Have you heard about the new Jelly App.  Jelly was founded in April 2013 by Biz Stone and Ben Finkel (look up some articles about twitter, if you are not familiar with these names).

 Using Jelly is said to be sort of like using a conventional search engine in that you ask it stuff and it returns answers.  This is very possibly where the similarities end.   Jelly will potentially change how we find answers because it uses pictures and people in our social networks to hunt for answers.  

The reality is that getting answers from “people” (friends, colleagues, acquaintances) is very different from retrieving information with algorithms like a typical search engine.   Jelly is designed to search the group mind of your social networks.  You ask the question in the form of a photograph and your friends help provide the answers.  What goes around, comes around.  You may find yourself answering questions as well as asking.  You can help friends, or friends-of-friends with their questions and grow your collection of thank you cards.   You will find that it feels good to help others.

They chose the jellyfish to represent their product because it has a loose network of nerves that act as a "brain" similar to the way we envision loosely distributed networks of people coordinating via Jelly to help each other.

OK, you may be asking why this is relevant to fashion.  At first glance, this new Q&A app may help with trend spotting or other fashion relevant issues.  For example, maybe we can post a photograph of someone wearing an interesting pair of shoes.  We can ask our friends if they know who is the fashion designer behind the creation.  Or possibly we can ask, “what store sells these shoes?”.   Wow, I can think of tons of stylish questions that I can ask about with this new system.  With that said, the system also has some issues to consider prior to joining.  Below are a few issues that I found today in their FAQ section.  In all honesty, I am not too thrilled with the answers to these questions.

How do I remove a social network connection?

We currently do not support the ability to remove a social network once authenticating it.

How do I block someone on Jelly to stop seeing their questions?

We don’t currently support the ability to block someone on Jelly. We do support reporting content as inappropriate and telling Jelly that you don’t like a certain question.

Possibly these answers will change in the future.

You can learn more about the Q&A app at the Jelly blog. 

If you have thoughts regarding how this new program can be used for the fashion industry, please share your comments below.

By the way, you can follow Apparel Search on Twitter and Facebook so we can possibly connect with Jelly.  However, it is not yet supported on the Fashion Industry Network social network nor on Google+ (where you can find fashion).

We are looking forward to testing out Jelly.  Are you?

Thank you for taking the time to read our fashion blog post. We hope that you have found this news to be informative. If you have comments or questions, please add your thoughts in the discussion area below.