iPhone Vanity app creator, Tav Shande gets email rebuttal Special

Digital Journal interviews Tav Shande, the creator of the iPhone app Vanity, following an opinion piece on the use of the app as a rating tool making the point that using it in this fashion is actually a tool for discrimination.

After writing the opinion piece on the iPhone app Vanity, Digital Journalist received an email from Tav Shande, the creator of the Vanity app. Shande is an artist who has the start of a very good industry resume. It was a nice revelation was visiting his web site and seeing some of his work. Shande is for real, and has very nice sense of style and format. His photo work is very good, his videos show a promising future, and the look he is creating is all his own. Shande creates very clean lines, very sensual, and he imprinting his own vision of the world. He is in every sense of the word a working artist so here is his rebuttal of sorts to the opinion article this journalist did on Wednesday. “First off thank you for covering my app, Vanity. I think it's the longest article written about the app so far, even though I disagree with quite a few of your points, I appreciate you sharing your opinions. I'm an artist, that's my passion, and art is what I do for a living. The golden ratio has been used for centuries to make paintings of human faces more attractive to the human eye, such as the Mona Lisa and countless other works of art. It is a number that occurs in nature and how alot of the features on human bodies are divided by distance. The app rates how close your features are to that number. It never calls you ugly or pretty, or hot. It just shows how close your features are toy the golden ratio. I can see how you may see this app as passing judgment on people - that is one way you can use it if you choose. You can also use it as an artist tool to analyze how close a drawing of a face you created matches to the golden ratio standard used in many of the master paintings from the Renaissance era. My main concern was that you mentioned in your article someone sent you an email marketing the app to you. If so please send me a copy because I have never spammed anyone about buying the app, the most I've done is make a YouTube video with music I like showing how the app works. I would like to find out who is sending mail with links to my app as a "hottie finder" as you stated. I also think the Nazi comment you made was a litte much but that's your opinion.” This is the second email from Shande after Digital Journal sent him the link to what we found so he could respond to it fully informed and what he had to say was surprising. One note: Nobody likes the Nazi word used in anything that relates to them, but in context it was used as metaphor to describe a feeling and not to place name on or disparage Shande or his work. It was used if anything to describe the essence of the use suggested by the writers of the email piece. “I am currently at work right now and won't be able to call till later. I saw the whole UrbanDaddy article and believe there is some type of miscommunication between me and you. They are not actually selling the application, just linking to website that I have made. If people sign up for their service they deliver news to their email. This just happened to be one of their recent news stories. Please correct me if I am wrong. They are free to cover the app as a news story and since they are not selling it. I am okay with their coverage just as I am okay with your article about the app. From the sounds of your article I believed someone was selling the app outside the apple app store and marketing it without permission so I was very concerned. I do not believe this is the case. The UrbanDaddy article seems to be just a fun/favorable review of the iphone App passed around to members who signed up for their online service. I will follow up with you asap. People have the freedom to use the app however they like and upon releasing this app I knew some people would take it the wrong way, as a shallow tool to judge superficial qualities of people. I hope people will see it as a fun tool to calculate the golden ratio within facial features." Shande makes some very good points and eloquently states his side of his apps story. Two points though, upon releasing the app he did know there would be issues with its use (controversy leads to exposure and is a form of marketing). Second, nowhere in the original article does it mention the golden ratio. What Shande does stress is that Urban Daddy has presented the article in news format. Shande himself calls it 'news' three times in his emails. Urban Daddy is a web site, not a news organization, but is using a familiar tactic used to market on the Internet. To do SEO work, search engine optimization, articles are written about a product or service. Then is distributed in a wide variety of Internet venues. In this case, it really comes off as a legitimate news article, even Shande believes it is. It is actually carefully contrived to appear as such, but in reality is part of a marketing departments vision for promoting apps on the IPhone. This has become standard operating procedure for giant corporations presence marketing machine on the Internet. It is a step beyond the traditional press release that reporters receive. Corporations now stack the deck and rather than depend on the graces of the press,`use sites like Urban Daddy to advance their products and services. It could be said that Urban Daddy was created with one of its primary intents to be a distributor of these types of marketing devices. Proof of this is the steady barrage of this formatted articles since the original one on the Vanity app. Also, these articles are not free, they are paid for through channels that do at times, create a layer or two of distance, but are in essence paid for advertising wearing the mask of real news. The challenge for the Internet user is to decipher what is real news and what is marketing. Internet marketing is still a gray area, and slight off hand, and even savvy suffers can still fall for this and think of it as real news, instead of a promotional piece that’s intent is do SEO work. This has been an example of how things work on the Internet, for better or for worse, this is how it is done, for now. This Digital Journalist felt is was important to allow Tav Sande his side of the Vanity story. It is up to you to draw your own conclusions if any at all. The bottom line here, is the bottom line, dollars and sense for the apps web site, the distributor, and of course, Tav Shande, artist who created Vanity.