Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Jelly is a new way to search with pictures and people from your social networks. It's also people helping each other—something that's both meaningful and fun.

Humanity is connected like never before. In fact, recent white papers have concluded that the proverbial “six degrees of separation” is now down to four because of social networking and mobile phones. It’s not hard to imagine that the true promise of a connected society is people helping each other.

Using Jelly is kinda like using a conventional search engine in that you ask it stuff and it returns answers. But, that’s where the similarities end. Albert Einstein famously said, “Information is not knowledge.” Knowledge is the practical application of information from real human experience.

Jelly changes how we find answers because it uses pictures and people in our social networks. It turns out that getting answers from people is very different from retrieving information with algorithms. Also, it has the added benefit of being fun. Here are the three key features of Jelly....

Thanks to TinyLetter and the demise of Google Reader we're all emailing like it's 1999...

...TinyLetter is to MailChimp what Tumblr is to WordPress: It's newsletters for dummies. "I think my mom could use TinyLetter," claims Kiefer Lee. Unlike MailChimp, which caters to businesses and offers all sorts of testing and analytics features, TinyLetter provides just the basics. Writing a message is just like writing an email in Gmail, meaning the process takes only as long as crafting the body text.

Getting people to subscribe to letters is just as easy. TinyLetter provides an embed code for those who want to put a box on their website. Or interested readers can head straight to a letter's TinyLetters landing page, which consists of a short description, a place to subscribe, and a link to previous messages, all against one big, bold, and beautiful image.

Oh, and unlike MailChimp, it's free. The service does have a limit on subscribers to a given newsletter, but the company works with very popular mailers on that....