I’d love to thank everyone at Prodigi for the great support, especially my team on this project. Ronza for being a one-of-a-king project coordinator and Tarakiyee for being one inevitable developer. I also want to thank Sarah and Dima from Seagulls for the great follow-up, contact and efficiency, Rob Stevens & Farah Madadha for the great work, effort and support. You guys rock! This wouldn’t have been this great success without you.

I hope you guys enjoy it.

1- Because it is not fair

Take this example, some agency is promoting a brand and wants to pay less on online advertising, so they run a competition where they ask users to take specific photos and upload them, whoever gets most likes gets the reward.

What If someone is really social and could care less about his privacy and has 3000 friends while the other has 200 friends, and the one with a better photo is the one with least fans. This is not fair, this will lead users to spam, post links on other pages to increase votes or have to add people they never wanted on their friends’ list. this is not fair for any user. Sometimes it even becomes a loyalty issue, where people from one country/tribe/race vote for someone because he belongs to their country/tribe/race.

2- It became a cliche

Almost 90% of the pages in Jordan (and I can say MENA) used this trick to have more fans and never charged the way they were picked “randomly”. I became allergic to pages that give an iPad 2 as a gift for example. Marketing executives or strategic planners through this as an option whenever they can’t get more creative.

3- Facebook doesn’t allow it

In Facebook’s recently updated Promotions Guidelines, in the 3rd sentence Facebook strictly states that: You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant. Feel free to report any page and make it work.

4- It increases spam and encourages people to leave Facebook

The more spam, photo tags, name tags and promos I see recently, the more I prefer Google+ over Facebook. Maybe because it is new and less annoying, even twitter feels better some days. Many users including myself started even ignoring the ads on the right sidebar.

5- The hidden play around it

Many agencies started making apps where they faked “likes” so Facebook doesn’t disable their promotions and started to use similar like buttons/icons to achieve this thing and in the end, they get to copy most of your data and information with your “approval” of access/permissions so they could let you enter to win.

Your thoughts?

The story behind this design is simple! Blackberry smartphones are now popular, many bought the device for the Blackberry Messenger software/service which is a chatting system that only works on the devices with the service, called BBM as a short-name, people can add each other through codes, every device has its own code. Easy?

Now, Us Arabs tend to Arabise things in funny ways… the question that most of Arab Blackberry users ask is “What’s your BBM pin?” which is either “Sho BB Emmak?” for guys, and “Sho BB Emmik?” for girls…

What I did here is turning that into a funny quote, playing around the words… Apparently, anything followed by “Emmak” (your mother) just sounds offensive in Arabic.

The long-awaited design is OUT at Mlabbas finally, buy NOW!

Here are the screenshots and saved images from the facebook page before he removed them (click on thumbnail for higher quality version):

صاحب الصفحة ازال التصميم منها والبوم الصور وقال انه لن يعمل منها المزيد. ولكن حسب المصنع الذي زوده بالبلايز فهو لا يطبع كميه اقل من ٢٠٠.

هنا نضع الصور من صفحته قبل ازالتها

Here’s my original design:

and here’s his traced stolen version:

What can I possibly do guys? please advice… he is making money out of it, sold hoodies already.

صديق من اصدقائي بدأ صفحة على الفيسبوك وسماها يا إلهي شو اني آوسوم وكان إلها شعار حلو بالانجليزي فأنا رحت عملت للصفحة لوجو عربي ،وحتى عملت مزيج غنائي بدون توقف وسميتو باسم هالصفحة… بس صاحبي هاد مزاجي شوي وبيوم من الايام وقف الفيسبوك… بعد ٣ اشهر ولا بالصدفة بنعملي انفايت على صفحة واحد بيبيع بلايز شتوية وعامل تصميمي عليها… وعشان يبين السرقة فهو عامل حركة ببرنامج الالستريتور بتشف التصميم بس مو دقيقة، لاحظو زوايا التصميم المطبوع وكيف نقط حرف الياء مش مستديرة.

شو اعمل؟ اروع بالملف الاساسي اللي عليه تاريخ الملف عالمحامي؟

I was almost dying the past 2 days with a bad flu, and constant coughing. My temperature was 38.8 C and I was sweating like a person on the edge during the event. I’d also like to thank Omar Al Taweel for letting me present before him, I was about to collapse after the event.

I presented my success story, Nando’s Kuwait and Fred the Chicken that was done at Leo Burnett Dubai/Kuwait by me and co-workers. This account was the reason I quit advertising and joined a social media agency for.

Update: Here’s a link to the group, unfortunately the .org is gone, but here’s the FB group. Here’s a link for the YouTube channel as well.

and then, I quickly went through this prezi of mine.

Here’s the link to the source I got the facebook pages rank from (link). I hope you guys enjoyed it. Thanks a lot Amman! You’ve been good to me.

After reading articles on SaudiMac (Thanks Zamil). My friend tried this and it worked for him too!

iPhones from the UK store are officially unlocked, which means any SIM could work, none of the providers in Jordan offer microSIMs yet but you can clip yours using scissors and have your SIM ready for your iPhone 4.

Orange is getting the iPhone 4 probably end of year and it is going to be locked with a crazy-ass expensive postpaid bundle (like what’s happening to me with the Blackberry service now). So, why not buying the phone from the internet and then recharging your prepaid Orange line and purchasing 3G Data bundles, Better? No?

Anyways, you’ll need to have a Shop&Ship account from Aramex (Shusmo, I’m advertising here for free this time) and a prepaid VISA filled with money (Cards from Bank of Jordan can be filled for more than 500 JD but need 2 days to activate, best solution because other banks limit the cards to 500 JD).

First of all, you proceed to Apple UK Store, where they sell the 16GB for £499 (552 JD) and the 32GB From £599 (663 JD), both models ship in 3 weeks and for free. Select the model you want. (the 16GB is originally for £424.68 but with VAT £74.32 added it becomes £499.00) and the rest is just as easy as anything online. You create an account, enter all details and put your address as United Kingdom and use the Shop&Shop UK inbox details provided by Aramex’s website.

Wait for 3 weeks for it to arrive to your UK mailbox (it might takes less) and give Aramex 4 working days (based on experience with their fast UK service). And If you order it by now, you’ll be a happy iPhone 4 owner by Eid.

Thanks SaudiMac for the great post.

Finally: Linkedin now let’s you display your portfolio.

It seems that all of us, and every designer we know, is on LinkedIn. Why? Its the defacto professional directory, and its where our peers, big companies, agencies, and clients connect with us. But there has never been a way to showcase our portfolio work on our LinkedIn profiles.

For over a year, Behance has been working with the LinkedIn folks to develop a special application within LinkedIn that allows ANY creative professional to showcase their multi-media portfolio.

The new “Portfolio Display” application allows anyone to create a free portfolio, display it on LinkedIn, and keep it in sync across other sites like AIGA, the Art Director’s Club Young Guns site, and the Behance Network. You can create unlimited projects (with unlimited images, videos, multimedia) and upload them, via the Behance Network, to display on their LinkedIn profiles.

The application allows the 70+ million LinkedIn members – as well as hundreds of millions of visitors – to ACTUALLY SEE your creative work (rather than just read your resume). If you are a creative professional on LinkedIn, you should join the Behance Networkand then sync your portfolio with LinkedIn.

If you are already a member of the Behance Network, simply install the Creative Portfolio Display application on your LinkedIn Profile. This is fantastic! Hat tip to Mattias and Scott of Behance.

Hat-tip: Swiss Miss