Newest app Jelly chooses a .CO domain

The newest venture of Twitter founder Biz Stone wants to adapt searches to our visual culture. Remarkably, you will not find the site on Jelly.com...

When “serial entrepreneur” Biz Stone presents a new project, the world breathlessly watches, full of interest. The same scenario unfolded for Jelly, a new search engine. The principle is simple: you post an image, like e.g. a picture that you made of a building, an object, a street name sign, etc., and you ask a question about it. Others can then answer your question. You get a stream of messages and you can, as it is often the case for social media, follow other users. And of course, you receive notifications about questions or answers that you may find interesting.

According to Biz Stone, who was also involved in the creation of Twitter, this should become the new way of searching. Our computer and our smartphone are indeed no longer text machines, but rather image machines. And as Albert Einstein once said: “Information is not knowledge”. Knowledge is the practical application of information derived from human experience.

If Stone is right and Jelly will indeed one day dethrone Google and Bing remains to be seen. Many observers complain that they cannot figure out Jelly, just like they would with the jellyfish from which its name was derived. But hey, they initially said the same about Twitter – and who can imagine living without this instant news machine today?

What we have here is an interesting app that is available for both Android and iOS. But what we are mostly interested in is the fact that the app cannot be found under a .COM domain name. Nice-sounding .com domain names are indeed rare, and jelly.com belongs to a gelatine manufacturer. That is why Stone first resorted to Jellyhq.com, but that name is too difficult to remember. So finally, he went for Jelly.co – with the country code for Colombia. Jelly thus joins the numerous start-ups that are forced to draw inspiration from clever word combinations, because a .COM domain name is not free anymore or has become outrageously expensive. Combinations with .US (United States), .LY (Libya), and yes, even with .BE (Belgium) can offer solace in that case.

Hopefully, the arrival of the new gTLDs will give those start-ups the necessary breathing space to fully develop on the Internet, thanks to a nice-sounding domain name. In any case, there will soon be plenty of options: had he waited a little while longer, Stone could have attached Jelly to a .APP, a .HOT and even a .SEARCH extension!

By the way, if you wish to obtain more information on the new domain names and the opportunities they offer, take a look at our special section “From .APP to .ZONE”.