It’s Day 8 of Gizmodo’s March Madness Challenge for the Greatest Apps of All Time, and one of the most controversial apps of our time has entered the ring. Venmo Buries “I’m Rich” Yesterday’s Money App Wars, receiving more than 78% of the votes. Today, the king of Weibo applications has captured the fortress of long-reading.
If you’re just tuning in, you can read all of our selection criteria for this historic match right here. Check out the full list of contestants embedded below. As always, if you think we’ve missed your personal favorite app, give us a shout in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.
Let’s make one thing clear, our first nominee is Twitter, not X. So, if you’re hesitant to like Elon Musk’s app, your conscience is clear. Likewise, if you want to lick Elon’s boots with your vote, you’re out of luck. What we are talking about here are bird applications.
17 years later, we don’t know how many current users . What started as a place to tweet about what to have for lunch has grown into a reliable outlet for real-time news (and fake news).Some The strangest character On the internet, they take the time to post just for the love of the game. The Arab Spring briefly convinced many that Twitter had the power to topple authoritarian governments. While Donald Trump dominates Twitter, the app seems equally capable of supporting tyrants.
While other social platforms race to add as many features as possible to their apps, the beauty of Twitter is that it changes very little. It gives users 140 characters to express themselves and nothing more. In 2017, that number was increased to 280 characters, and people thought the sky was falling, but the extra number definitely improved the experience. Experiments with live video and audio have floundered, but this simple tweet remains powerfully impactful.
But it’s not all good. Like every other social platform, Twitter screws up when it comes to privacy, safety, harassment, misinformation, censorship, and child exploitation. Of course, there’s a good argument that Twitter has always been a really bad app. This argument has been made every day since Elon took over. Although the app’s quality has declined somewhat since Twitter’s demise, X remains the best online place to get yourself canceled.
In the case of Twitter, we have Read It Later, better known as Pocket. Read It Later launched in 2007 to solve a big problem: there was too much to read online. As the 7,000-word New Yorker feature awaits reading, browser tabs pile up. Read Later simply gives users a place to save all the interesting stuff they see while browsing at work and let them read it later, even if they’re not connected to the internet.
Aside from a name change to Pocket in 2012 and the addition of some discovery features, the app’s core functionality hasn’t changed much. They got it right the first time. But the way we consume content has changed a lot. Social networks and search engines push us towards low-quality news designed to elicit a reaction, which makes it even more important to have a lengthy article in your pocket as soon as you see it.
So, reader, what would it be? Do you waste so much time on Twitter that you have to send it off to the next round, or are you grateful that Read Later adds a little sophistication to your browsing experience?
Voting has ended and Twitter will challenge Venmo in the next round!
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