Civil enough Vimeo?

For the second time, I have had my account summarily deleted from Vimeo’s web site – each for stupid reasons. Keep in mind, I was also a paying customer at the time. Also, keep in mind that paying for video hosting when YouTube is readily available, has a much MUCH larger community, where you can earn money for your creations AND upload unlimited amounts of HD video, is basically idiotic in the first place.

So for those who don’t know, Vimeo is a web hosting provider. Back in the day, they were one of the only ones which had HD video upload and embedding. However, you needed a Plus account, which i purchased for not only my own personal use but for business purposes. In fact, when i worked at an advertising agency, i would routinely buy Vimeo Plus accounts for all of our clients. Why? The HD embedding plus player customization (e.g. it didn’t look ugly like YouTube’s).

The thing is, the administrators (or the community, or both) are hypocrites. They flag videos for deletion that every other site on the planet finds perfectly acceptable. For example, I like to record World of Warcraft videos of myself playing. Some of them, include helpful guides for improving your character. Personally, i see no difference in this and people creating guides to do other things, like cooking, or taking better “photos and videos” which are all over Vimeo. Are those removed? Nope.

You can visit Vimeo’s home page and find tons of copyrighted content. Just yesterday a featured video included ripped scenes from almost every natural disaster movie of the last 20 years. The video in question was poking fun at the impeding “rapture” which is “scheduled” for tomorrow.

So, this morning I got an email from Vimeo informing me yet another account of mine was DELETED. Not a warning. Not that the videos I uploaded were removed. That my entire PAID VIMEO ACCOUNT was deleted. In so many words I was told if i wanted to argue this with them I could email them back (by the way this notice came from an anonymous account “rights@vimeo.com” they aren’t even comfortable putting their name behind their actions). They also include a disclaimer that the argument needs to be “civil” which is idiotic coming from a company which just deleted month’s of my work.

Here was my response:

“Refund please. You guys are terrible. Civil enough?”

Seriously, if you are a content creator/producer I “implore” you to stay as far away from Vimeo as humanly possible. First, they have a horrible community there, it is small, they have absurdly small upload limits even for PAID customers (Vimeo Plus), and they will not even hesitate to delete all of your content without even so much as a warning.

If you care at all about people seeing your stuff, you are so much better using YouTube. You can upload as much as you like, the processing of your upload isn’t slow (unlike Vimeo, again, even for paid Vimeo Plus customers), your content, even if it is in violation of some rule (a rule which isn’t “you can’t upload a video about a video game”) gets flagged but not deleted and YouTube actually allows you a chance to change the content to make it work with their network, unlike Vimeo.

In closure – it pains me to have to bad mouth a company, but Vimeo certainly deserves it. Seriously, how this company has any customers is amazing.

I say it is alright to harbor a negative, or critical thought every once in a while. Some people do not, and I guess that is their right. But the truth is, if you never have a negative thing to say, or that you think EVERYTHING and EVERYONE is awesome, all the time, then something is seriously wrong with you.

Its perfectly acceptable to say that:

• Cameron Diaz is a terrible actress
• Jaden Smith shouldn’t have been allowed to perform at the Grammy’s
• HP is blatantly copying Apple with the ‘TouchPad’
• Ashton Kutcher is the antichrist

And a bunch of other provocative statements. We don’t have to agree. In fact, agreement is kind of boring most of the time. I’m an individual, I have my own opinions and readily accept that some people don’t share them. I just happen to not care if people disagree with me.

I actually have more than one book but iBooks doesn't know it

Despite being a huge Apple fanboy, even I have to admit that there are certain things that Apple doesn’t do well at. I’ve got serious questions about the quality of several products that Apple has launched, anything from the Apple TV to Mobile Me. Even have a few gripes about little things like the Apple Remote that comes with your mac.

But the one product I feel like Apple has failed miserably at is iBooks.

Apple’s modus operandi is to look at the market for something and substantially revolutionize or improve it. They did it with laptops, with music, with phones and now with tablets. They tried to do it with selling and reading books online but have fallen way short of their primary competition, Amazon.

I’m not even talking about the device to read books, because I think the iPad is superior to the Kindle in about 1000 ways. No, my biggest complaint is the iBooks application and the iBooks store.

The biggest problem with iBooks is just the selection. I have about a 20% success rate so far of even finding the books I really want to spend money on while looking through the iBooks store. They simply aren’t there.

Secondarily is the way the bookstore syncs. I recently lost about 4 books from my virtual ‘bookshelf’ when i moved my iTunes library from one mac to another. No idea where they went. I suppose I could troubleshoot this a bit and get them again, but its very distressing to go to read something and find out you can’t (far more so than wanting to listen to a podcast or a song that has vanished, there is a much greater personal investment in reading a book in my opinion).

The Amazon kindle app, which runs great on the iPhone, iPad and even over the web, has worked well for me without a hitch. It is fast to buy books (if far less integrated than the iBooks process) and there is a great selection. I believe that titles on the Amazon store also are cheaper, at least in the few circumstances where I have been able to find the same book on both stores.

I just feel like iBooks is inferior to Amazon in every way, and it pains me to say because I really like the vast majority of Apple’s stuff. I guess they can’t be great at everything.

Today was a historic day for fat blowhards. That’s right, Michael Arrington sold his blog Techcrunch to AOL. My immediate (and present) reaction to this news was that I really hope AOL spent less than a million to buy the site, because Techcrunch is (and always has been) a pretty mediocre site for news.

My biggest problem with Techcrunch is just that the site is barely functional in the Safari browser on a Mac. My second biggest problem though is that the writing there is horrid. I mean, I wouldn’t try to pass myself off as a professional writer on this site. Nor would I claim to be a journalist or anything of the sort. Yet, I am pretty damned sure I am as good a writer as either Arrington or MG Siegler.

Techcrunch is pretty much a site for people who care about startup companies and their funding. Surely it isn’t worth the reported $25 million it was sold for, I can’t believe there are that many people out there who fit into this demo. When it was the only source for this kind of information that would have been one thing, but now with Mashable eating their lunch (in regards to quality) I just don’t see how this makes much sense for AOL.

But really, AOL? AOL has been kind of a joke for the better part of a decade now. These guys just want to buy big blogs – they are starting to remind me of Yahoo a bit. AOL is about everything EXCEPT what people know them for, because what they are known for is really second rate internet hosting.

IKEA doesn’t believe in that for some reason. Only retailer I have run across that had an extensive online catalog and ecommerce site which does not allow you to see the status of your order online. For that matter, they don’t appear to send you receipts of transactions to email either.

I hit up their online support which is nothing more than an AIM style bot. I did get a funny response from it, though.

My disillusion with Google has been years in the making. I know I’ve written about it before on my blog so i won’t go into a deep dive on those thoughts. Maybe, just maybe my related posts plugin will find it so i don’t have to go searching through hundreds of posts.

But, the latest straw with my now hate/loathe relationship with Google is over their stance on net neutrality. Put simply, before Google got into the cellphone market, they were all for keeping the net open for everyone, and rejected having different tiers of service and cost for entry to the web. Now, they have Android and want to buddy up with Verizon to make even more money with their cellphone operating system and their content sites.

There has been a ton of outrage to this stance, which of course is welcomed (and a bit surprising with how much tech sites cater to Android and Google) but what is really needed is a mass exodus from Google sites and services.

One small problem though – where would people turn to in lieu of using Google for search and email?

Bing is still a pretty crappy site. The ui isn’t horrible, but the results are suspect and because hardly anyone uses it (comparatively speaking of course) it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me as a search engine marketer to stop using Google.

For email, I use Mobile Me and Gmail. It would be really hard for me to ditch Gmail completely because although Mobile Me has made some improvements to their service, its problem is that it is slow as hell. It also doesn’t have some of the organizational flexibility in managing messages and contacts that Gmail does. If it does, well i haven’t found those options.

I actually lost respect for Google a long time ago.

Back when I worked at TCCWCBN (The Career College Which Can’t Be Named) we spent about 300k a month on Google Adwords. Back then, that was more than almost every online retailer was spending with Google. We’re talking like, 8 years ago, when Google Adwords wasn’t very well known, before Google went public, back when Gmail wasn’t even a glimmer in some dork engineers eye.

And Google was cool back then. They were very focused on helping their clients achieve great results. They made engineers available to talk to clients, and had my team up to visit the ‘Googleplex’ in Mountain View a total of 5 times. I remember being picked up in a limo from the airport in San Jose for christs sakes.

Google is evil - gevil.com

Then things changed. First, management teams on our accounts lasted a year or less and then were out. Either those folks quit Google, or they got moved around someplace else even despite our request to keep our client team intact. The support got more shoddy, even though our spend never went down.

That is roughly around the time i stopped being in love with Google. The attention they gave us was definitely nice, but then their product started to fall into decline.

When you look at Google now, its easy to see that ‘search’ isn’t at the forefront of their company any longer. Google phones? Google TV’s? Google operating systems and browsers? Google’s version of WebMD?

I find it particularly despicable (and evil) that Google had a seat on Apple’s board, then backstabbed Apple, took their ideas, and are now competing with Apple. It is one thing, of course, to decide that hey, we are going to do our own thing. Its another to set up a conference in which you go out there, literally copy everything Apple has been working on for the past 5 or 6 years (phones, browsers, tablet, television) then proceed to slam the same people you’re copying.

I don’t give a shit about Google. Yeah, they drive a lot of traffic to web sites and yes, Adwords is the easiest way to buy your way onto search results. As for their products beyond search? They mostly suck ass. Gmaps and Gmail are good, but simple, applications. I can’t think of anything else that Google does that has been very successful. They can’t take credit for YouTube as it was always successful. Google Wave was a complete piece of shit. No one uses Google Talk. Their social networking projects are abortions. Google apps are second rate. Android is complete trash compared to the iPhone OS. Google TV? It is a Apple TV retread. Who is going to sit on their couch with a keyboard and “search” for shows. TV is difficult? Are you fucking retarded, TV is the easiest its ever been to use.

Fuck Google. Seriously. This is enough to make me want to use Bing.

Lately i have become increasingly disillusioned with the state of, well, our entire government and country. It just seems to me that a 50/50 split between liberals and conservatives is absolutely devastating to our ability to get anything done, or even more fundamentally, get along with each other.

I don’t remember there being a time when there was so much hate out there. Even I have to admit, i really do hate right-wing ideology. Despise. I was just looking at the morons who were commenting on the White House’s official Facebook page.

The President is a domestic threat to the country. He has caused more job losses. What?

Everything to destroy jobs. Of course.

This genius went to a mexican restaurant to apply for a dishwasher job and was told no cause he couldn’t speak spanish. Yes, he also lived in Arizona. Well, that might be the only believable comment in this whole bunch. Still makes him a moron, though.

I am not so much going to break down our jobs situation for the countless idiots out there who blame Obama for them (even when he came into office under pre-existing depression-like economic conditions) as much as i like to read my own thoughts after the fact. I know it makes no difference  to either people who agree or disagree (once a teabagger, always a teabagger).

Our economy sucks mostly due to two things – the housing market shitting the bed (because under regulated banks offered up loans to people who had no business taking them) and two simultaneous wars that we aren’t winning and that are taking all of our available funds and flushing them down the toilet. Unfortunately there isn’t much that can be done about either of those situations now after the fact. Republicans are standing in the way of financial reform (makes sense for them, i mean, if we can’t fix the problem then we can blame Obama for it later) and of course, the war isn’t going away anytime soon, as pointless as it is.

So we are destined to have another contentious election coming up. Whoever is elected will be reviled by roughly half of the country, and will not be able to make any progress to solving these problems. You can surely bet that when a Republican is voted into office, the calls for their removal will begin the day after they take office. Its just the way it is. Politics has turned into a sport where there are winners and losers. If your ‘team’ doesn’t get voted in, then you are going to stand up and boo and wish ill on whoever is in there. Remember all the religious folks praying for Obama’s death? I foresee that happening again, with whoever is unlucky enough to be elected.

Lately my blog posts have become very boring. Too much self censorship and talking about life’s mundane details. I’m constantly engaged in an internal battle where I worry about being perceived as only writing negatively about things. But, as i go back and read my own writings, it is the rants that are the most interesting (and truthfully, more in character with who I really am).

So, i am going to go back to my hypercritical writing style.

Where to start?

There are tons of issues in the news lately to write about so this should be easy:

Arizona – basically, the state sucks. I am glad I don’t live there any longer. The only two things that have stuck with me since leaving are 1) the fact I developed allergies that persist even to this day after moving there and 2) the fact I still have a house there that is being rented out.

Nowadays, I am actually embarrassed to tell people I lived in Arizona due to their stand on immigrants. Notice I didn’t say “immigration” or “illegal immigration.” People can say what they want, but there are a lot of racists in Arizona. I always heard people talking about mexicans and/or hispanics in derogatory tones. These are a people that have come to our country to work – whatever their motivations for doing that may be. It is wrong to stop people in the street and ask to see proof of their citizenship just because they are hispanic. We aren’t doing that for arabs, why do it for hispanics?

Adobe – You guys make second rate stuff. Seriously. If Apple doesn’t want to run your crappy software on top of their phone operating system thats their prerogative. Flash is garbage, there I said it. Make something good and then I am sure Apple will let you play in their sand box.

Gizmodo – hack bloggers – notice I didn’t say “journalists.” You guys paid for a stolen phone and risked legal action all so you could juice your traffic for a few days and sell more banner ad impressions. Hope that was worth it! Its an insult to real journalists that you are trying to hide behind a law designed to shield actual professionals. The public doesn’t have a right to know what secret R&D Apple is doing. Go to hell Jason Chen – or, rather, go to prison.

My lack of an iPad - It is patently absurd that I don’t have one yet.

I swear I am not in a bad mood, but I’ve got a lot of negative things to say today for some reason. Although i rarely ever self-censor my writing or speech, even to clients when i was working in an agency, I tended to not go out of my way to really point out the dumb shit people say online when it comes to marketing.

For example, while I have trained clients on how to use Twitter, and how to integrate that into other communications, I never put it out there that I liked Twitter. My approach has always been, “you know I know a lot about this tool because i have used it for a very long time, and i am happy to show you how to use it, but for me personally, it isn’t all that great.”

Conversely, I am more than happy to teach AND preach the use of Facebook – because it is a site/tool i actually believe in.

I read something today which was absolutely retarded though. I am not going to link to it because I am a firm believer in denying links to sites which don’t deserve them. This post was on ‘content strategy’ and was absolute nonsense. It looked as if someone bought an introductory book to SEO and just stuffed as many keywords into her article as possible.

Now, I see links being published to shit like this all the time. I’ve even been asked to re-tweet or re-publish links to these types of posts. Its a basic tenet in social media – basically, to engage in a circle jerk, in order to build up your own personal credibility. I have seen entire consultancies built on this principle. All i can say is that I am so glad that I don’t have to be part of that world (in fairness to me though, I never was).