MANILA, Philippines – Twitter co-founder Biz Stone launched a new, free app named Jelly on January 7, allowing iOS and Android users to ask and answer questions from people in their social network.

Users of the app take a picture and ask a quick question to one’s social network, and other Jelly users in the network can provide a short, helpful response to the question.

While question and answer services and apps have been available in various forms, Jelly aims to promote something beyond an ecosystem of information: empathy.

In a TechCrunch interview with Stone, the Jelly app’s founder explained how the app was meant to foster empathy among users answering questions.

Stone explained, “Using Jelly to help people is as much more important than using Jelly to search for help. If we’re successful, then we’re going to introduce into the daily muscle memory of smartphone users, everyone, that there’s this idea that there’s other people that need their help right now.”

The quick, simple offering of knowledge to another person, by Stone’s reckoning, facilitates reinforcing the idea that there are people who need help around the person answering a question.

Stone elaborated on this, saying, “Beyond being a very useful search engine, like I said before, it creates this circle of empathy, where people realize that ‘Oh, there’s other people who need my help and I can actually help them’ and they’ll feel good about it and they’ll get trained to thinking about helping other people. And, maybe that’ll even jump outside of the app and just into the real world and they’ll start looking around and helping people and wouldn’t that be great?”

It’s an intriguing spin on the commonly utilitarian purpose of getting help and information. Whether it takes off depends on how many users adopt the app into their routine – Rappler.com