Why Vimeo is awesome and Facebook is Scary!

Everyday there are two websites that I constantly check. Vimeo and Facebook. I have found myself wasting hours upon hours of time checking Facebook for no necessary reason. But what is so scary about Facebook.

Well since Facebook incorporated their location services into the social media website, I believe Facebook has become scary because it is now officially impossible to escape without someone knowing where you are at all times. I have the type of friends who tag us wherever we are and because of that everyone knows where I am at nearly all times. To me that is a terrifying thing that someone can always find me at any time of day.

I do understand the benefits of being able to check in at places, you can check in to get a discount at a restaurant, it helps out citizen journalists and so on and so forth but it is impossible to escape and get away without someone knowing where you are at all times.

To me Facebook has become a distraction and its power has reached a level of scariness.

A website that I find myself using daily for inspiration and to share videos and films that I have worked on is Vimeo. Vimeo has become a creative persons outlet where one can share and ask for feedback on projects without having to worry about spammers and random people commenting with unnecessarily negative feedback.

I think it is safe to say that without Vimeo I would not have had the opportunities career-wise that I have currently had. Vimeo gave me the ability to host films with their website and embedded them in my portfolio website. Their ease of use and the creative and helpful feedback that you get using Vimeo is great.

Hopefully in the near future I will steer away from Facebook or Facebook will give the option to turn off its location services. Finally I will continue to use Vimeo and support the creative website because it is a very powerful tool for creative people.

Osama is Dead how did you find out?

As most people know by now Osama Bin Laden was pronounced dead yesterday, he was killed by U.S. Navy seals outside of a Mansion in Pakistan. I think we can all agree that it is good that this finally happened, it only took over ten years and a few billion dollars to kill a man in his fifties who needed dialysis everyday, but thats beside the point. I think its really interesting how quickly this news spread across the world through social media websites.

I know that I found out about his death the moment I logged into Facebook and one persons status read " we finally got Osama, proud to be an American." From their I instantly went to CNN's website to read the breaking news articles. What I found interesting was that I logged back onto Facebook only minutes later to find nearly every person that I'm friends with status about how we killed Osama Bin Laden. From there people were posting songs like God Bless America and America F**k yeah!

It was really interesting to see how quickly news spread about this over social media and the great amount of national pride people were showing because this terrorist was killed. This goes to show how Facebook and other social media website can be used succesfully to broadcast news instantly across the world.

Then I started think about the people who were posting all of these songs and status about Osama Bin Laden. I wanted to know how many people actually went out to different news sources to see if this was true like I did, or if people just saw their friends status and instantly believed it and started spreading the news and posting songs supporting America. I really wanted to know this because when I first read this persons status I didn't believe it, so I searched out for trusted news sources to verify it, and I wonder if other people did the same.

What made me question this was the thought that if everyone believed their friends status without checking the news or searching for more information and it wasn't true, what would happen. I looked at Facebook like almost a gossip column, and it is scary that one person can say one thing has happened and everyone will believe them, it is scary because people could make up rumors and spread them and misconstrue them.

Anyway it is always interesting to look at social media websites when major events happen to see how news can get misconstrued and changed simply by peoples Facebook status's.

Apple knows where you are!

Recently Apple has been heavily criticized for embedding a device in Iphone's and Ipad's that tracks the users location even when the location services feature on the phone is turned off. Apple responded to reports that they are tracking users only to improve their location features on the phone and tablet and that if users wanted not to be tracked they had the option to turn off the location services feature.

The Wall Street Journal did a study and found that even when the location services feature was turned off the phone was still transmitting location points, granted it wasn't sending them back to apple but the phone and tablet were still communicating with cell towers and storing location data in the devices.

I don't know why people seem so surprised that Apple is tracking and storing information that it gathers from the location services that are provided with their devices. I think its safe to say that if you have any device nowadays has GPS or some sort of location service, that someone somewhere is tracking or at least looking at that information. The government has had the technology to track and even tap our cell phones for years, yes technically if they tap a phone illegally or use it to track you illegally then it is wrong, but its the government they can change the law and continue to do what they do.

In today's day in age if you think you aren't being tracked or watched you are very oblivious to what's going on around you. Your at a computer right now, meaning you are on the internet, meaning that your IP address is giving off a location so that specific advertisements can be shown to you because you are in a specific location. Thats just one simple example. Nearly everything we do whether it be email, text, talk on a cell phone or whatever it may be is monitored or has the potential to be monitored and tracked very very easily.

So to everyone who is getting mad at Apple for storing location information, get over it you are being tracked probably 10 other ways, let Apple do their thing, who knows maybe it will make my damn Iphone actually work.

Facebook Making Money off of your Profile

Do you even notice that every advertisement on the sidebar of Facebook somehow relates to one of your interests or musical tastes or simply something that somehow relates to your interests. Well thats because Facebook has openly admitted to selling your information to advertisers so that they can adjust the advertisements to each demographic and interest group.

Last year Facebook made $2 Billion and that is expected to double each year for the next few years. Also nearly one-third of all ads that were put online were displayed on Facebook. This is simply because we are willing to give up tons of information that we would normally be turned off by if an advertiser asked for it but because we have "friends" on Facebook who we think will be the only ones looking at our profiles.

Yes it is scary that we are being individual targeted by advertisers because we are willing to give up so much information that we would normally not give out, but is there an actual benefit to this for some people.

I recently read an article about small business owners who claim that they owe their business to Facebook because of advertising. Small business owners have the ability to take out an ad on Facebook and target the people in a certain radius of their business who have some similar interest to the product that this small business sells or whatever they may do. This gives small businesses the ability to advertise in a very powerful hyper-local context. Small business owners have noticed that when they do advertise on Facebook their business has doubled or tripled or even more.

So before everyone says how bad Facebook is that they sell everyones information to advertisers wait because they are actually benefiting many small business owners which is therefore supporting a large portion of society and all together benefiting this country because roughly 52% of America are employed by small business. So even though it is scary that we are individually targeted by advertisers because of Facebook I'm willing to give my information to support small local businesses and small business in general.

Record Store Day has Come and Gone...

Spring is in the air but on Saturday the 16th of April the dusty smell of records being dusted off and the warm sound of music on vinyl was in the air. For any of you who don't know what I'm talking about, Record Store day was this past Saturday and it was awesome as usual.

Living in Chicago we have access to some of the best record stores in the country according to Rolling Stone. Record stores like Dusty Groove, in Wicker Park, Dave's Records in Lincoln Park and Laurie's Planet of Sound in Ravenswood are constantly rated among the best records stores in the country, and Record Store Day gives yet another reason to go shop excessively for records at these shops, but Record Store Day doesn't just give individuals an excuse to go to shops they might never go to or just support their local record shops but it brings a worldwide community of music snobs (myself included) together to support shops that still sell vinyl and show everyone that digital music will not be the demise of vinyl records.

It is awesome to see how many people come out to Record Store Day and support their local shops because it would be a shame to see any of these record stores go out business, but I also think people should still make time when its not Record Store day to go to these local shops. Instead of simply downloading music from Itunes or worse illegally downloading music.

Keep your local record stores in business and support your favorite artists by buying Vinyl or even buy a CD, don't just settle for the easy way out by downloading some overly compressed Mp3 that sounds awful!

If you didn't get out to Record Store Day this year go next year, keep up with their website, and check out some of the cool stuff that artists do to support local record stores or for charities. This year the Beastie Boys released a limited amount of 7" vinyl singles from their new album through the Record Store day website and all the proceeds went to a relief fund for the disaster in Japan.

So again this is a good cause support Record Store Day and support your local record stores!!

Who is tired of advertisements on Pandora?

Like many other people I use Pandora radio daily on my phone pretty much wherever I'm going and I cannot describe how tired of listening to advertisements on Pandora I am. Its like no matter where you are even if you are just trying to listen to music there are ads everywhere.

Well recently Pandora radio received a subpoena from a federal grand jury looking into whether smartphone apps, I.E. Pandora share information with advertisers and other third parties. When the subpoena was issued Pandora openly admitted to "sharing" personal information so that their listeners could be provided with targeted advertising.

I'm fairly certain that Pandora is doing more than sharing information, because before Pandora was well known they didn't have any ad's and it was awesome! Then the developers of Pandora realized they could capitalize on all of the information that they were gathering from all of the people using their service. They realized they could sell all this information to advertisers and make loads of money, which they have done.

In my opinion when people started getting upset about the ads and questioned why they were there thats when they gave the option to upgrade to Pandora Pro, for 36 dollars a year. So either way they were making money off of you, whether from advertising or for the 36 dollars you are paying per year for a service that was once free not too long ago.

One can only hope that the outcome of this case is less advertising. The Federal Trade Commission said that they are developing a tool that would allow you to not be tracked on websites like Pandora that collect large amount of information from you. I hope that this tool is put into place soon so I can be free of ads and just enjoy listening to music.

How vulnerable has Epsilon made you?

If you are anything like me you are receiving email after email from companies with whom you normally deal with except now they are saying that their security has been compromised and to watch out for emails that are phishing for your information. I don't know but it doesn't seem to promising when I'm getting emails from my bank, saying their system was hacked into by an unknown source and to be careful if I receive suspicious emails. That is the last email I want to get from my bank.

As you probably know Epsilon, who is the worlds largest "permission" based email marketing company was hacked into. This unknown source had access to millions of email address and names spanning from banks to Target to many other companies. With access to all of this, this unknown source sends out a more advanced version of spam emails because this source now knows more information about you. These emails look real and are asking for passwords or bank account numbers, or really anything so that they can get money out of you.

I think it is ridiculous that in todays day and age some of the largest companies are still not fully protecting themselves and their customers and because of that they are increasingly vulnerable to hacking attempts that can cost them and their customers millions of dollars. What is it going to take before companies begin to realize that they are compromising their companies name, trustworthiness and reputation by simply being to cheap to protect themselves?

According to many reports over 2,500 companies information was part of this recent hacking "attack" of Epsilon. Epsilon said that the hackers only got roughly 2% of all of the information that they store and have access to. The problem with that is that 2% of all of their information is still millions of people.

So what can you do to avoid being lured into one of these scams? First and foremost the easiest way to avoid having to deal with these fraudulent emails is to delete any email that seems the least bit suspicious. Also make sure that you do not give any information to these scam emails. All of the companies that have been affected by the hacking "attack" are saying that if you receive an email that seems suspicious do not be afraid to call the companies hotline asking if that email is legitimate.

Hopefully soon companies will learn to protect themselves and their clients before it costs everyone millions of dollars more. For more information about the Epsilon incident and why it is more likely for you to be part of these "phishing"attacks on your smart phone, check out the New York Times article by Amy Gahran.