The answer is that we kind of are. Although we’re not planning on shutting down Fluther. In fact, we just upgraded Fluther to be much faster and have no ads.
Here’s the long story. I was an early advisor to Fluther when Ben co-founded it. I helped them raise money and advised on product. When Twitter acquired Fluther in 2010, the service itself, Fluther.com, was specifically carved out of the deal.
When I found out Fluther was cut out of the deal and in jeopardy of being shut down, I created an LLC and bought out Andrew, Ben’s co-founder. So right now, Ben and I own Fluther.
We came up with the idea for Jelly (askjelly.com) in part because we were thinking about what to do about Fluther but also in part because we wondered what a search engine powered by people would be like, and could it be better in some cases than web search.
So now we’ve got askjelly.com, an iOS app, #askjelly on Twitter and three browser extensions (askjelly.com/extension). We’re hoping that there will be some happy overlap between Fluther and AskJelly, even though there are differences.
More to come!