Twitter cofounder Biz Stone is taking another crack at changing the world.
Stone and a seven-person startup launched a question-and-answer style social networking app on Tuesday called Jelly, available for free on iOS and Android. The app asks users to submit questions alongside a picture captured from their phone's camera.
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Connections from the user's Facebook or Twitter accounts can then respond to the question through the app.
"In a world where 140 characters is considered a maximum length, a picture really is worth a thousand words," Stone wrote in a post on Jelly's blog. "Images are in the foreground of the Jelly experience because they add depth and context to any question."

Users can respond to a friend's question with a link, by drawing on the original image, or simply using text. Users can also forward questions using text message — so in theory, you don't need to download Jelly to help your social connections gather answers to their questions.
The app provides a service that already exists on a number of other platforms, including Twitter, the company Stone helped build (he left in 2011). Other sites, like Quora and Ask.com, already focus exclusively on question-and-answer style interactions.
But Stone said that Jelly was built with the expectation that users will help answer your questions — a feature other social sites like Facebook and Twitter aren't primarily used for. Jelly's mobile-only approach enhances its functionality, Stone added.
Jelly was born out of Stone's passion for helping people; he believes the app can make an act of kindness relatively simple. After leaving Twitter, Stone spent time pondering how the world operated with so much connectivity. It was then that he stumbled upon the idea for Jelly with cofounder Ben Finkel. Prior to Jelly, Finkel cofounded Fluther, another question-and-answer service that Twitter acquired in December 2010.
"I was trying to imagine, 'What is the true promise of this newly, wonderfully connected society?'" Stone said in an interview with Mashable. "The only thing that I can think of that makes the most sense is people helping each other."
Jelly's future may rest on two aspects of the app: the algorithm used to determine which users see which questions, and the information Jelly is bound to accumulate if users adopt the app.
The questions asked aren't shared with all of a user's social connections. A simple algorithm — jokingly referred to as the "Finkel Rank" after the cofounder — surfaces questions to the most relevant audience, Stone said. This algorithm will improve over time as the app collects more data on users and should help improve Jelly's functionality.
Stone says the company is "more about knowledge than information retrieval" at the moment, but sometime down the road, popular questions will likely populate with answers within the app itself. A database of questions and subsequent answers could also help Jelly gain a foothold among its competitors.
Stone has been working on Jelly for almost a year since diverting his full attention away from the startup incubator Obvious Corporation, where he worked with fellow Twitter cofounder Ev Williams. Stone provided the early funding to get Jelly off the ground, but collected a round of capital in May from an impressive list of angel investors including Twitter cofounders Williams and Jack Dorsey, former Vice President Al Gore and Bono.
Jelly announced a permanent office in San Francisco in November. The app's name was inspired by jellyfish, which have "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," Stone wrote in the blog post.
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Image: Andrew Burton/Getty Images