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!