Biz Stone, the 39-year-old blogging pioneer and co-founder of Twitter, has announced plans for a new startup. It's called Jelly, but beyond that, the rest is mostly a mystery.
Stone's announcement, posted on JellyHQ.com and his Twitter account, was short and mysterious, and left the tech world guessing what was up the mogul's sleeve:
People are basically good – when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it.
Stone, whose prolific activity in the startup world most recently saw him joining Buzzfeed's Jonah Peretti and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams as advisors of discussion startup Branch, revealed little else but that the tool would be free, mobile-first and not ready for "a while."
We know little about what Jelly will do – and bloggers are taking their guesses – but tell us: what else should Jelly do?
Check out this timeline of Stone's contributions to the world of blogging, technology and social media and tell us what you'd like to see next.
1999: Joins blogging startup Xanga as creative director
User name? Genius. Modest. After the advent of other blog sites like Tumblr and Blogger, the latter of which is why Stone decamped to Google, Xanga is now the 5,166th most-visited site on the Internet.
2003: joins Google as a senior specialist
Arguably the most mainstream company Stone has joined (other than the one he co-created), Stone further developed blogging platform Blogger after it was acquired by Google.
2006: launches Odeo
"We just launched a new site called Hellodeo.com which makes it easy to record webcam video and grab the code for pasting into xanga or whatevah," Stone wrote on his Xanga blog. Odeo was sold in 2007, and the service suspended itself in 2010.
2006: co-creates Twitter
"I'm spending time working on Twitter.com these days," Stone wrote on his Xanga blog shortly after launching the service that would change the way people around the world communicated. Years later, Stone would tell people at a conference in Montreal that users shouldn't spend too much time on the social networking site.
Present day: investing and advising in everything
Over the past few years, Stone has been spreading his knowledge of the startup world to all corners of the internet. He's invested in Viddy, Square and Intercom and served as adviser to DonersChoose.org, Plinky.com and Fluther.
Stone also found time to co-found The Obvious Corporation, which is billed as a company that develops "systems and mechanisms that help people work together to improve the world". Sounds like Jelly could be a tool for do-gooders on the go. It wouldn't be the first time a startup mogul launched a site in the name of social activism, but it could be the first of its kind to succeed – Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes launched Jumo to match potential donors to charity organizations, but the launch was rocky and the company was eventually acquired by GOOD.
Present day: vague Jelly announcement
So, what should Jelly do? Use #makingjelly on Twitter to share your idea about what you'd like to see next, or tell us in the comments below, and we'll add your ideas to this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment