“Let’s help each other”
Yesterday saw the official unveiling of Jelly, an app for smartphones which allows users to ask questions, accompanied by a photo, to their extended social networks.
Humanity is connected like never before. In fact, recent white papers have concluded that the proverbial “six degrees of separation” is now down to four because of social networking and mobile phones. It’s not hard to imagine that the true promise of a connected society is people helping each other.
http://blog.jelly.co/post/72563498393/introducing-jelly
An example could be whilst going for a walk, you spot something unusual, or are just curious about. There is no information to hand about what it is, so you snap a photo with the Jelly app and ask your connections. And their connections. The question can be passed to quite a large network.
Alerts can be enabled so that when your friends ask questions it’s possible that you could get answers back fairly quickly.
Archaeological applications could be varied and useful.
“Is this a bell barrow or a bowl barrow?”
“Does anyone recognise the decoration on this sherd?”
The possibilities are endless.
Obviously there are limits – a square format photo can only contain a limited amount of information – and it doesn’t look like hashtags have been implemented in the Jelly app yet. It would be great to follow #archaeology on Jelly to see what questions people ask. However, you can post your questions to Twitter and Facebook, and use has tags there, so all is not lost.
It may be branded a tool for the ‘lazyweb’, but knowledge in numbers is often a very good thing indeed. Jelly is certainly a service to keep an eye on.
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