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Work · March 10, 2011

MI

My inherently "viral" experiment: 3Pics.me

As you can tell, it's heavily influenced by Mark Bao's threewords.me. The concept is simple, upload three pics and let your friends vote on them. In fact, I think I may have ripped the concept off a post about threewords.me. Anyways... Basically, I just wanted to build something stripped down to a core functionality and a little different from my usual projects. I've spent a lot of time polishing the flow and trying to make sharing an inherent part of the app. It's built on Ruby/Padrino/Sinatra, Postgres and uses S3 for image hosting. This is actually my first Ruby project coming from a pure…

My inherently "viral" experiment: 3Pics.me launched on March 10, 2011 with 15 votes, #65 of 272 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.

Alternativestop 24% of March 2011

In plain words

3Pics.me is a voting app where users upload three pictures and share them with friends to vote on their favorite. Built with Ruby, Padrino, and Sinatra, the application emphasizes a streamlined experience with sharing as a core feature. It uses PostgreSQL and S3 for image hosting and is designed for anyone who wants to crowdsource opinions on photos in a simple, stripped-down format.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

As you can tell, it's heavily influenced by Mark Bao's threewords.me. The concept is simple, upload three pics and let your friends vote on them. In fact, I think I may have ripped the concept off a post about threewords.me. Anyways... Basically, I just wanted to build something stripped down to a core functionality…

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