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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone returns to 'be Biz Stone'
Six years after leaving the company he co-founded, Biz Stone is returning to Twitter to "guide company culture." Or, as he put it in a blog post, fill a "Biz-shaped hole" he left. Stone won't be replacing any existing executives. Instead, this appears to be a new position that's designed to address internal culture issues "so it's also felt outside the company."
Pinterest acquires Jelly, the startup from Twitter's Biz Stone
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's startup Jelly has seen plenty of twists and turns since its 2013 introduction: it launched as a crowdsourced question-and-answer service, pivoted, and then pivoted back to its original concept in 2016. Now, however, it's poised for its biggest change yet: Pinterest has acquired Jelly. The terms of the deal aren't available, let alone the ultimate intentions, so it's unclear just what will happen. Will Jelly be independent, or melt into its new owner? Stone sees the deal as important to the "future of human powered search and discovery," though, so you know what his focus will be.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone relaunches failed Jelly app
Biz Stone's resurrected Jelly app officially relaunched today, and where the original 2013 app was something like Instagram-meets-Yahoo Answers, Stone sees the latest version as a return to his original vision and an alternative to Google.
Twitter co-founder to relaunch Jelly Q&A app
For a short period Silicon Valley followed Jelly, a question and answer app developed by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, with great interest. It attracted a sizeable community but, like so many other mobile apps, eventually lost traction and the media's attention. Jelly isn't done just yet though. Stone is planning a major relaunch, or an "un-pivot," which will refine the company's original premise: "Helpful answers for busy people."
Twitter co-founder launches Super, yet another way to share your opinion
A wise person once related opinions to one of many things we all have. And it's hard not to think of that when looking at Super, a new opinion sharing app launching today for the iPhone and Android. Text prompts like "the best," "the worst," and "the craziest" invite you to shout your opinions to the world alongside a relevant photo. Like Twitter, it rewards pithy text and clever wordplay. But photos are just as important, making it feel equally like Instagram. You can even double-tap on a post to "like" it, a behavior that Instagram popularized. The more I played around with it, the more Super seemed a generator for those text-heavy posts that always seem a bit out of place on Instagram. (And which inevitably get more likes than my carefully composed landscapes.)
Jelly catches up with the rest of the internet by adding comments
Jelly tries to get answers to the questions that keep you awake at night. A question we've had since its launch, however, was why it lacked any kind of comment or thread system. Fortunately, that's Jelly's new feature. Once you've got an answer, but you'd really like to hear some more detail, you (or whoever answered) can continue the dialogue below. These replies are also public, so they could help everyone. Biz Stone's new project just got a lot more viable -- provided you can find someone to answer your question in the first place.
Biz Stone's Jelly answers your questions through photos and social networks (video)
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's Jelly project has been shrouded in mystery for months. Is it a social network? A distributed computing hivemind? As it turns out, Jelly isn't anything quite so special -- but it's worth checking out all the same. The newly unveiled service expands on Quora's basic concept, drawing on the collective wisdom of Facebook, Twitter and Jelly itself to both answer questions and identify objects in photos. If you're stumped, you can forward questions to just about anyone. Jelly's Android and iOS apps are available today, so it won't take much to learn whether or not it's worth the wait.
Twitter #Music lead Kevin Thau joins Biz Stone's mysterious Jelly project
If you're not familiar with Kevin Thau, you ought to be: he worked on many of Twitter's early mobile efforts, helped integrate it into major platforms and headed up the Twitter #Music app. That's what makes his newly confirmed move to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's new firm, Jelly, so interesting. While little is known about Jelly beyond its plan for a decentralized service, Thau will be heading up numerous aspects of business operations at the company while it builds "world class mobile products." We'll have to wait awhile before we see his influence, but his presence hints that Jelly is more than just a casual project.
Twitter founders create Branch and Medium to keep the conversations, collections flowing (updated)
If you've ever been so embroiled in a chat or sharing splurge that you've been told to "take it off of Twitter," you now can -- sort of. Twitter co-creators Biz Stone and Ev Williams have launched Branch and Medium, two companion services that (naturally) use a Twitter sign-in but narrow the focus to just a few subjects. As the name suggests, Branch lets especially vocal Twitter users invite others into conversations that don't clutter everyone's feeds or cut replies off at the 140-character limit. Medium? Think of it as Pinterest turned publishing platform: members can publish either a static collection of favorite articles and media, for reading and rating, or leave it open for more collaborative efforts. There's no rush to open the floodgates to the invitation-only portals, though. Stone and Williams see the quietness of their new services as an antidote to the madness of regular social streams, and we can't help but sympathize. Update: The services don't quite work in the way The Guardian originally suggested. Branch lets you invite others into conversations through email, not just Twitter. Medium is really a self-publishing system, not a Pinterest-style sharing service. Also, the Twitter founders were just the most prominent investors in Branch and Medium; they weren't responsible for creating the companies.
