Pictorious is a photo sharing startup that is faced with the unenviable task of crawling its way out of Instagram’s gigantic shadow. Today they’re releasing a bevy of updates to their iOS app, which will hopefully help it mount a better challenge against the photo sharing juggernaut.
Pictorious distinguishes itself as more than just an ill-advised Instagram clone with their photo challenges feature. Users can invite their friends to photo challenges on any given topic and earn points and rewards as they upvote or downvote pictures.
Today their update adds branded challenges to the mix, which can be used by companies to create photo challenges for their advertising campaigns. Pictorious has partnered with Popchips for the first of these branded ad campaigns, which challenges their users to build “artwork” with Popchips.
Full disclosure, we received several boxes of chips from Popchips to participate in this photo challenge. You can view my own handiwork below.
Another new feature is Photo Showdown, which you can use to vote between two randomly selected photos taken from a photo challenge. The more pictures you vote on, the more points you acquire. It’s addictive in a stupid way, but it really doesn’t accomplish anything. It wasn’t long before I was presented with two pictures that were both equally boring.
Despite the updates, Pictorious is still a little like what Instagram would be if all of your followers were complete strangers. Pictorious desperately needs a larger user base, and in spite of their best efforts, I’m pretty sure potato chips aren’t going to help them get there.
Pictorious can be downloaded from the iOS App Store here.
