Twitter founder alters direction

Biz Stone knows that abandoning a struggling project to try something else can be a smart move. He was part of a team that dumped the seldom-heard podcasting service Odeo nearly a decade ago to work on a new idea called Twitter that transformed how people communicate and made him a multimillionaire.

Stone, 41, is hoping that his latest change in direction pays off as he heads down a new path at Jelly Industries, a San Francisco start-up that he launched shortly after leaving Twitter three years ago.

Jelly made headlines 16 months ago with the release of a mobile app that taps into social networks to find experts who can answer questions that stump Internet search engines. Within a few months, Stone and Jelly co-founder Ben Finkel realized that the question-andanswer format wasn’t catching on, so they came up with a different app called Super for sharing opinions.

Super is trying to broaden its appeal with an app update that became available Wednesday. The new features will enable users to select and post the faces of other people who have set up profiles on the service. After “facetagging” people, their images mingle with the selection of emojis and large, colorful text that Super provides for users to create emphatic messages declaring their passions and peeves.

The goal is to infuse Super with a fun-loving vibe that was notably missing from the more scholarly Jelly app.

“Super is more about expressing yourself with an emotional bent,” Stone said. “Unfortunately, Jelly was too much like doing homework. People literally did their homework on it. It just wasn’t the business we wanted to be in.”