Which came first the Jelly or the Fluther?

Today Biz Stone launched “Jelly.”

You might love it. You might hate it: “Yahoo! Answers for the bourgeoisie.”

If you watch the intro video of Jelly you’ll be introduced to Ben Finkel, CTO.

For what it’s worth – below is an interview I did with Ben in 2008 about his then startup Fluther.  In the interview Ben explains that a “Fluther” is a flock of jellyfish and that the jelly was an important metaphor for the project. Fluther was a social question-and-answer site. 

Fluther was acquired by Twitter in 2010. I presume this is where Biz and Ben met.

From a TechCrunch article today: ”

“We chose the jellyfish to represent our 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,” Stone notes. It’s not the first time Stone’s q&a interested have been piqued by the amorphous imagery of a jellyfish.

 But the Jelly metaphor I think was something Ben brought to the table. He makes a reference to it in this interview from 2008. You’ll note that user adoption is something I harp on a few times in the interview. I don’t keep coming back to it because I want to be a jerk, but because I know firsthand how hard it is for a small, young endeavor to take off. I wanted to find out how it was going for them and if they had any ideas/tricks/advice/etc.
I’d hate for the answer to be that you need to be bought or become friends with a Biz Stone……. Instead, I hope there is just something truly different or unique about the product. I remember Fluther and will be curious to see how Jelly works (how Fluther has evolved) and even more curious to see user adoption.
(If you don’t see the video – it’s here)

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