Cinch App | Klout To Discontinue Cinch Friday, April 18th 2014

The Cinch App that was developed by San Francisco-based Klout, and designed to be a kind of mobile-based Quora, but geared toward giving advice-type answers to questions you posted, will be discontinued tomorrow: that’s Friday, April 18th at 12 PM.

Here’s the email on the news that came to this blogger just about 10 minutes ago:

Hey there,

We’d like to thank you for being a part of Cinch and helping the world tap into great advice. We’re sad to say that we’ll be discontinuing the Cinch app at 12pm PST on Friday April 18, 2014.

We appreciate the time you’ve put into Cinch, and we hope that you’ll continue to give great advice to those that need it. If you’re looking for an alternative advice app, you might want to try Yabbly or Jelly.

We also hope that you’ll check out the new Klout mobile app, the best way to create and share content that people will love.

Thanks again,
The Cinch Team

Jelly is the new Cinch App-like app developed by a team led by Twitter-founder Biz Stone. At first, I was skeptical that it would do well, but the app’s interface and ‘swipe’ style of getting new information is addictive. And I’m not the only one who’s warmed to it, since it’s introduction in January: Marketing Week UK reports that brands have signed on to use it since its launch.

While it’s hard to find numbers to tell exactly what the story is, the simple fact that Klout’s PR people mention Jelly and Yabbly should give an idea that their apps not getting the traction they would like.

UPDATE:

This blog post over at the Cinch website explains in better detail the reason Cinch is being shut down:

Our goal at Klout has always been to help people have an impact online. Through Cinch, we created a new way for our users to directly impact each other by asking questions and receiving timely, personalized advice on mobile devices. Although we received an overwhelmingly positive response to Cinch, we believe that focusing our efforts on the newly relaunched Klout iOS app and soon-to-be-launched Klout Android app is the best way to help our users going forward.

Stay tuned.