Jelly’s first week: 100k questions asked, 25% answered

When Twitter co-founder Biz Stone launched his social question and answer service Jelly last week, most seem baffled about whether or not it had any real use.

New figures from RJMetrics could suggest that the answer is a resounding “maybe”. While the figures can’t point out how well Stone’s mission of turning us into a collective human consciousness is going, they can shed some light on how many questions are being asked and answered and what kind of questions people are asking. The data was assembled using publicly accessible (if undocumented) API endpoints, which were then fed into RJMetric’s systems.

According to the research, there were about 100 000 questions asked in Jelly’s first week but only around 25% of those received actual answers. It also shows that there was a lot of buzz around launch date, but that’s died down fairly quickly in the following days.

Interestingly, there were a surprisingly high number of legitimate inquiries among the slew of “Hello World” posts in the first week. In fact, says RJMetrics’ Robert J Moore, out of the top 10 questions posted, every single one of them was an image identification question: people asking their social networks to figure out who, what, or where something was.

Given the timing of its launch, it was inevitable that a fair number of people would ask “what does the fox say?”. Equally unsurprising were the most popular answers to the question:

• “Kakakakakkapowwwww”
• “Ringdingdingdingdingdingdingding”
• “Juba juba juba juba joo”
• “Hathi hathi hathi how”

As to Jelly’s future, its daily user numbers do seem to have dropped off fairly substantially since launch:

A part of that drop off may be down to people spending less time online over weekends, but may also have something to do with the relatively small percentage of questions that actually get answered.

One thing that Jelly does appear to have in its favour however is a certain level of addictiveness. The more questions you ask and answers you give, it seems, the more likely you are to keep asking questions and providing answers.

While only 16% of people who ask one question ever come back to ask a second one, that number jumps to over 30% once a second question has been asked and over 50% after a third.

It seems therefore, that the Key to Jelly’s success lies in getting people to stick around past their first question.