Joshua Schachter
Joshua Schachter, best known for creating social bookmarking site Delicious, started Tasty Labs in November 2010 with a vague mission statement: “We’re putting the useful back in social software.” On Friday, Tasty Labs announced its first product to the public: Jig.com.
Jig is meant to be “a marketplace for things people need,” wrote Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson (a Tasty Labs investor) in a blog post Friday morning. In an earlier post on Jig’s own blog, Co-Founder Nick Nguyen wrote:
“Our Jig is a website, one that helps you will your needs — by making it easy to share them with people who can help solve them. We build Jig to make it easy to describe what you need with just a few words.”
Essentially, Jig allows people to post questions about anything they need — there are no categories yet, just one big stream — and allow anyone out there to answer them. At the top of the page is a prompt that starts with “I need” followed by a text box that allows you to write a descriptive title, your location, and a few details. Jig has one section for answered questions (more than one person can answer, and each reply can be voted up by clicking “I agree” or “Thank”) and a second section for unanswered questions.
As I’m writing this, some of the questions on the answered page are titled “I need a new show to watch,” “I need a place to buy silk suspenders in Berkeley,” and “I need to find a new loving home for my MacBook air.”
Craigslist strikes me as the initial comparison here, but Jig is different because it has better messaging features and provides each user with a profile. But it’s not exactly clear what edge Jig has on the offerings from companies either the Q&A space, such as Ask.com, Answers.com and Quora, or the peer-to-peer task management space such as TaskRabbit and Zaarly. According to SEC filings, Tasty Labs has raised $ 3 million in venture capital to date, so the company may still be cooking things up to further develop the Jig idea.
Image of Joshua Schachter courtesy of Flickr user Joi Ito
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