Welcome back to Gizmodo’s March Madness bracket challenge to name the greatest app of all time! Flappy Bird punched above its weight in yesterday’s contest but ultimately folded and with 54 percent of the vote, iMessage advances to the next round. Today, the Dick Pic app goes toe-to-toe with the short-form video platform that was too good for this world.
If you’re just tuning in, you can read all about our selection criteria for this historic contest right here. And as always, if you think we missed your personal favorite app of all time, yell at us in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.
A dozen years ago, our first challenger noticed that society had a problem. People were sending each other nudes that later came back to bite them in the ass. The solution? A messaging platform that auto-deletes images and text. Remarkably, that idea grew into a social platform with around 400 million daily active users that is dominated by kids and generates significantly less controversy than many of its peers. (Yes, all of those things are related.)
In that time, Snapchat has become an idiosyncratic company that has gotten into augmented reality and (less successfully) commercial hardware. It has seen many of its original features like Stories cannibalized by competitors, particularly Instagram. But it continues to truck along while not setting the world on fire, not being profitable, and not flaming out—largely due to the potential investors see in catering to that teen demographic it still holds on to. Like every other company on Earth in 2024, Snap thinks its future is in AI even though its users hate it.
Taking on Snapchat we have what may be the most squandered opportunity in social media history: Vine. In 2013, Twitter was still called Twitter and Vine was its entrée into the video business. Unlike YouTube, Vine limited users to clips that could be no longer than 6 seconds—Twitter for video, if you will. That simple setup unleashed a flood of creativity online and launched the careers of many influencers who are still with us today. Basically, every time the comedian Conner O’Malley is in the news, I see a fresh round of people sharing the 17-minute compilation of all the vines he made at the platform’s peak.
Like Periscope, Spaces, and well… Twitter, Jack Dorsey and team never really figured out how to make Vine work as a business and the app was shuttered in 2017. The archive of its content was nuked in 2019 and YouTube ended up being a big beneficiary of its creators’ output through the countless compilations that live on over there. But in a way, TikTok picked up where Vine left off and has since become one of the top 5 social platforms in the world.
Elon Musk threatened to bring Vine back in 2022, but as with most of his promises, nothing has become reality.
So what’ll it be, readers? Let us know in the poll whether you think Snapchat’s stickers beat Vine’s raw inspiration. And check out the full bracket below for the winners and losers so far.
Voting has closed and Snapchat has fallen. Vine moves to the next round!
The Greatest App of All Time: March Madness Bracket Day 1
The Greatest App of All Time: March Madness Bracket Day 2
The Greatest App of All Time: March Madness Bracket Day 3
