Turns out…It’s against Facebook’s terms of agreement.
E. Promotions
If you use Facebook to communicate about or administer a promotion (such as a contest or sweepstakes), you are responsible for the lawful operation of that promotion, including the official rules, offer terms and eligibility requirements (e.g., age and residency restrictions), and compliance with regulations governing the promotion and all prizes offered in connection with the promotion (e.g., registration and obtaining necessary regulatory approvals). Please note that compliance with these guidelines does not constitute the lawfulness of a promotion. Promotions are subject to many regulations and if you are not certain that your promotion complies with applicable law, please consult with an expert.
i. Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or a Page App.
ii. Promotions on Facebook must include the following:
a. A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant.
b. Acknowledgment that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.
c. Disclosure that the participant is providing information to [disclose recipient(s) of information] and not to Facebook.
iii. You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app. For example, you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.
iv. 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.
v. You must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion.
vi. You must not notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles (timelines) or Pages.
vii. Definitions:
a. By “administration” we mean the operation of any element of the promotion, such as collecting entries, conducting a drawing, judging entries, or notifying winners.
b. By “communication” we mean promoting, advertising or referencing a promotion in any way on Facebook, e.g., in ads, on a Page, or in a Wall post.
We reserve the right to reject or remove Pages for any reason. These terms are subject to change at any time.
“I cried the first time I held a Nintendo 3DS. The experience was a revelation that I’ll not soon forget, and even if everyone stops making games for it tomorrow, my blue 3DS XL is not going anywhere. That little machine is a window into a part of human experience that most people take for granted, but which is otherwise inaccessible to me.
Backing up:
I am mostly stereoblind. Stereoblindness is a blanket term for any condition that prevents a person from perceiving depth using binocular vision. Depending on whom you ask, it affects somewhere between 3 and 15 percent of the world’s population, which creates an interesting demographic hurdle for the 3D television industry. Some people are stereoblind because their vision in one eye is severely impaired, others because their brains are unable to coalesce images from both eyes into a three-dimensional result.”
As I spoke of in my previous post, I’ve been offering many of my resources I found while researching my Senior Project. While off galavanting around the internet I found some helpful resources for parents to get their hands on. Here are some great free downloads for parents who are looking to be better informed about the technology their children are using and how they themselves can use it as an educational tool.
The Modern Parents Guide to Kids and Video Games: “Nearly 40 years after their invention and a decade after exploding onto the mainstream, video games still remain a mystery to many parents, including which titles are appropriate, and their potential side-effects on kids. Now the answers are at your fingertips.
Offering unrivaled insight and practical, real-world strategies for making gaming a positive part of family life, The Modern Parent’s Guide to Kids and Video Games provides a vital resource for today’s parent. From picking the right software for all ages to promoting online safety, setting limits and enforcing house rules, it offers an indispensable range of hints, tips and how-to guides for fostering healthy play and development.”
Own Your Space: “Whether you are a parent, caregiver, or educator, you can keep up with the latest computer and online safety issues and help kids learn to avoid the real dangers that exist in their Internet-connected world. In partnership with security expert and author, Linda McCarthy, we offer a free, downloadable version of her new book, Own Your Space: Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online.”
How the Internet Works:“The web’s place in our daily lives is undeniable. We can now access the Internet from our home computers, office, laptops and our phones. But even with this close intimacy many people still aren’t entirely sure what the Internet is and how it really works.
We aim to change that with MakeUseOf’s latest PDF guide, “How The Internet Works.” This guide, by Taty Sena, explores the hardware, software and organizations that power the modern Internet.”
It is becoming more and more common for young professionals to interact with potential employers via social network. Though, how often do you think about what you posy and how much you post in a day? While trekking across Pinterest one day (a site I encourage all designers to use to collect design ideas), I discovered this awesome infographic to help recent graduates towards being better professional social networkers . Though this infographic is targeted for Facebook users it still remains helpful to consider some of the suggestions for Twitter or Pheed (all the cool kids are doing Pheed now apparently), such as having a separate professional page to post on, or only posing between 3-5 times a day.
One thing I think more Graphic Designers need to understand is the need for social network. Social network isn’t just about keeping up with old friends, but also a great tool that is useful to build professional relationships and get potential employers interested in what you do and who you are. It is a first introduction before there is ever face to face contact, and if you think no employer really wants to Google you before meeting you face to face… you may want to think again.
So here are the “Facebook Dirty Dozen” to help you get on the right track with how to appropriately social network.
May people ask me as a designer if I ever think print will die. First I respond with laughter, because I often think it a rather stupid question. Then I proceed to say “I certainly hope not…”
Paperless has become quite a trend. People often think that we’ll be entirely paperless by some distant point in the future in order to save millions of trees and deforestation of rain forests etc. Their biggest advocate? The eBook. Why? Because there isn’t any paper pages, and often they’re cheaper to purchase. A pretty solid argument right? Perhaps… if you don’t live in a third world country.
There has been a big push for literacy in the world as a step towards solving poverty. It’s a great start I think, and a very noble task. People need to learn how to read as a means of making it through this life and becoming a “successful and functional member of society” (I’d love to hear someone tell an African Tribe leader that, they’d probably end up disgraced and kicked out of the village, or even worse in some cultures). Written language certainly can open many doors, but if we’re making the striving to build up the economic world using literature, we’d have to make it accessible to everyone. Now tell me, how many isolated tribes in the rainforest have pluming and electricity? Probably none of them huh?
What I’m getting at is this: eBooks are not all accessible. Not everyone in the world has internet. Not everyone in the world even has basic necessities for that matter. So why are we so convinced that going paperless is a real option for the whole world? Perhaps for more developed nations it can be a reality, but that would also cause the problem of increasing the poverty gap, and perhaps even possibly make poverty a bigger problem…or worse…cause us to take extreme measures destroying cultures by bringing in a very western and commercial line of thinking.
There is this great documentary on PBS about the development of nations based on the question “Why are some countries more developed than others?” It’s called Guns, Germs, and Steel based on a book by William McNeill and if you’re interested in the subject I recommend you find it or perhaps download it somewhere and watch it. It’s quite fascinating if you’re a history buff. It’s good stuff and talks about some of the issues of poverty and resources in certain nations, and how they developed into power houses and third worlds.
I do not think print will ever die. Printed books are easier to get to the masses that digital ones for the reasons I said above, and so many others as well. Paper is used in so much more than printed work, poster, fliers and pamphlets. It’s a practical resource.
If you need more convincing…then watch the video below.
So there is this site I kinnda like going on called Awwwards, which is an innovative web design site, and it’s really very neat…you should probably take a few hours and have a look….because you’ll need a few hours.
Anyway, there is this site I found on there called tweetflight, which is an interactive twitter powered film clip that actually take words from twitter posts and makes a live streaming music video. Don’t believe me? Go to the site yourself and take a look, or watch this YouTube Video.
Skeuomorphism. It’s a term you’ve probably haven’t heard much, or even at all, but you can see it almost everywhere. You open your bookshelf on your ipad and what do you see? A book shelf… designed to look like what you would in the real world. That’s skeuomorphism. At least that’s how designers have been using the term, which is inaccurate. It’s actually the mimicking of elements in a former or older device that were functionally necessary. Not necessarily the design looking like a real world object entirely…but I digress.
As many of you Apple product fans might already know, Scott Forstall, one of Apples designers, was fired over using Skeuomorphism.
“After Jobs’ death, Forstall become the company’s biggest proponent of skeuomorphism, much to the chagrin of the firm’s designers. “It’s visual masturbation,” one former Apple user-interface designer told Fast Company’s Carr. ”It’s like the designers are flexing their muscles to show you how good of a visual rendering they can do of a physical object. Who cares?”
- Should a Calendar App Look Like a Calendar? By Farhad Manjoo
Who cares indeed? Is it really that big of a deal to make objects on a screen look like their physical world counterparts? Personally, I don’t think it matters all that much. Real world objects are things users would be familiar with, and though on occasion it’s corny, I honestly feel like they make the apps and interface much more user friendly and quicker to read. People can tell what an app is for when they see a book shelf or a date book calendar, rather than some obscure screen with buttons and gizmos that have little to no indication of their use or function.
Yes, some of Apple’s software has become a bit corny. (I’m looking at your cheap-casino green felt, Game Center!) But those who advocate throwing out real-world textures and visual metaphors are missing something important. As designer Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin points out, when it’s used appropriately, skeuomorphic design can give users a quick sense of what an app does. - Should a Calendar App Look Like a Calendar? By Farhad Manjoo
Does it matter either way? Is it bad to make screen objects to look like their real world counterparts? The way I see it, if we’re using it daily in reality…why not make it look like it’s reality? Is it’s daily use not real enough for designers to want to make them look real? Because it’s certainly real enough for me. After all, it makes the virtual object more approachable for my generation, which happened to grow up from the transition between pen and paper to desktop. I’m used to using both, but perhaps in more recent generations, it may not matter as much to have any nostalgic allusion to the real world counterpart.
However obvious Apple’s skeuomorphic approach to UI might be, it’s an approach that is hard to argue with. The company is still considered highly innovative, and the success of its products is unprecedented–most would successfully argue that it’s by far the best we have. But aside from aesthetic reaons, it is hard to see how these designs will ever evolve beyond derivative representations. Will they just change color and increase their visual fidelity? -Can We Please Move Past Apple’s Silly, Faux-Real UIs? by Tom Hobbs
My question is, does it ever have to evolve? If it’s so classic do we need it to “get better” or even change? Perhaps the reason it’s so hard to argue with is because it’s so sustainable? I certainly feel like this is so. The way you can tell if something is designed well is if it can stand the test of time. Bookshelves still have the same structure as they have always had, and though we can change their color or paint them how we like in our homes, we certainly don’t change the structure of them much do we? So why would it be any different on screen. If it’s working well, why strive to change it. I think what we need to figure out is how to identify what is more valuable: sustainable or innovative?
We certainly live in a culture where everyone is striving to be “the next thing.” We automatically think that because we can have something new, we don’t want to hang onto what is sustainable. I’ve had my second generation iPod touch for a fairly long time in comparison to many of my peers. Why? Because what I have works for what I use it for…and it isn’t broken. But are we able to apply this same kind of logic to design? If it’s working, and remains relevant, is it okay to hold onto? Do we really need the next big thing in order to remain relevant, or are we confusing relevant with trendy?
Feel free to let me know what you think. For further reading visit these two articles.
Found this image going viral on Facebook. Makes one wonder what our priorities really are…and where I may or may not want to invest for my retirement. Then again there isn’t much information to say what all this really means other than to say we use more ink than we do human blood…which may be a good thing. Maybe it’s a good thing that blood doesn’t cost so much? What do you think? Are we as human beings be being taken for granted by the cost of ink? Again I don’t know the context or the research behind this infographic…but it certainly gets you thinking.
With the War ongoing and the dilemma of ethical technology use ever more blurry. Many lawyers have been conducting legal research on the matter and the issue stands whether or not it is a legal issue at all, or simply a moral one.
This topic was brought up by what is being called the ”White Paper Memo” saying the President has the right to kill indiscriminately using drones…including US citizens (don’t you just love the freedom of equality).
For an introduction to the topic, please visit the link below.
The link below is a video that discusses the issue of Drone Warfare and the argument against it’s ethical and legal use.
The link below is to a video of Harold Koh, legal advisor to the US Department of State, arguing that the use of drone warfare is legal according to United States and International law.
Regardless of a person’s stance on the issue, we have to agree that to every action there is an intention, and there are those things that are unintended.
Turns out…It’s against Facebook’s terms of agreement.
