We’ve been hearing little bits about Jelly, the latest startup from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone for about a year, but the product has now been formally introduced.

They’re calling it “a new way to search.”

More specifically, you take pictures of things with your phone, and ask your Facebook and Twitter friends about them. If they don’t have answers for you, they can ask their friends. That’s the concept behind Jelly.

The app is available in the App Store and Google Play if you want to check it out.

“My friend Ben Finkel and I – we like to go on these walk-and-talks,” say Stone in a video about Jelly. “I said, ‘Ben, what if we had to build a search engine, not a decade ago [or] fifteen years ago, but in today’s landscape – today’s technology landscape?’ How would we do something like that?”

“We stumbled upon this concept that everyone’s mobile,” he says. “Everyone’s connected, so if you have a question, there’s somebody out there who knows the answer. Jelly is a new way to search. It uses photos and people from your social networks to get you answers. For example, you might be walking along outside somewhere, and you may see something that’s just really strange or curious or interesting, and you take a picture of it and circle it, and you say ‘What is this thing?'”

“By using both your network and your extended network, there’s just an incredible amount of knowledge and information that Jelly gives you access to,” says Finkel.

“So you send your question out, and either someone you know directly has the answer for you, or they know someone who knows the answer, and that person can answer for you,” says Stone. “You’re helping people by answering their questions or even just by forwarding their questions. What it’s doing is it’s going out there and pulling knowledge – things that your friends and their friends – they know, and that’s a key difference, because knowledge is very different from information. People will be eager to help each other on Jelly because we are driven to help. That long term idea of making the world a more empathetic place is something that really drives us and makes us just really excited about the work.”

When you install the app, you can connect it to Facebook and Twitter. I’ll let you know what I think of it after I’ve had more of a chance to play around with it.

Some are calling Jelly a competitor to Quora, but I’m wondering if it’s not more of a competitor to Google’s search by image feature.

Images: Jelly (Google Play)