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With that battle won (at least according to Priebatsch), the next battle is over gaming. But we're not talking about simple video games and the like - we're talking about a "game layer on top of the world."

"The game layer is he next decade of human technological interaction," he explained. "Unlike the social layer, which trafficked in connections, the game layer traffics in influence. The game layer seeks to act on individual motivation - where we go, how we do it and why we do it."

Priebatsch says that the game layer could be 10 times as large as the social layer and that, used correctly, could help to solve the world's problems.

To prove his point, he then ended the session with a game - a massive game involving the entire several hundred member audience. As each person entered the room, they were given anywhere from one to three cards with different colors on each side. Each card had one of three colors on each side and were handed out randomly. To win the game, each row of the audience had to self organize to show only one color by trading with the audience members around them. That is, the entire room had to move from chaos to order, with each row only showing one color, within 180 seconds. If they did this, he said, SCVNGR would donate $10,000 to the National Wildlife Federation. One minute after he started the clock, he stopped it. The audience had self-organized, despite a variety of problems, in just one minute.

Priebatsch compared the various rules and problems faced by its players into ones the world population might face in solving global issues. There was a lack of communication, there were micro-trading issues, different allocations of resources from player to player, restricted movement decentralized leadership, and even different "countries," as aisles served as "oceans" between the rows. The audience did, however, have two things to work with - a countdown and a common goal. Despite these various factors, and through the proper motivation, a large problem was solved quickly through applied game mechanics.

No celebrations. Individuals throughout the organization may contribute to some very crucial project. But when the project succeeds — and there is a new jet engine or a new drug — very few of those people will enjoy the exhilaration of a personal win.

Long time spans. In their personal lives people enjoy activities with shorter and shorter time spans — sports events, computer games, texting and so on — whereas at work they must live through glacial planning cycles.

When there are sudden customer orders that must get shipped, or power outages, or fires and other emergencies, most employees come to life and get things done with spirit and enthusiasm.

These must-do situations all have some common elements that evoke the remarkable performance: A sharply focused, urgent goal A very tight deadline Autonomous team encouraged to experiment Results clearly noticed and celebrated

by designing jobs with these game-like characteristics and infusing a spirit of fun it is possible to enliven work and produce the kind of high-level, zesty behavior provoked by crises.

No matter how long-term a goal may be, carve off some sub-goals that have to be accomplished in a short time — 10 or 15 weeks not 6 months or a year. For each goal a team should be asked to plan an approach and carry it out. The whole effort should encourage some fun and creativity along the way. People should be encouraged to experiment. Success at the end should be celebrated.

Humans, like the mice in Skinner’s box, crave predictability and struggle to find patterns, even when none exist. Variability is the brain’s cognitive nemesis and our minds make deduction of cause and effect a priority over other functions like self-control and moderation.

Recent neuroscience has revealed that our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire.

Email, for example, is addictive because it provides all three reward types at random intervals. First, we have a social obligation to answer our emails (the tribe). We are also conditioned to know that an email may tell us information about a potential business opportunity (the hunt). And finally, our email seems to call for us to complete the task of removing the unopened item notification in a sort of challenge to gain control over it (the self). Interestingly, these motivations go away as soon as we’ve actually opened all our emails and the mystery disappears. We’re addicted to checking email while there is still variability of reward and once that’s gone, emails languish in our inboxes.

We’re meant to be part of a tribe so our brains seek out rewards that make us feel accepted, important, attractive, and included.

But as sociable as we are, our individual need for sustenance is even more crucial. The need to acquire physical things, such as food and supplies, is part of the brain’s operating system and we clearly wouldn’t have survived the millennia without this impulse. But where we once hunted for food, today we hunt for deals and information. The same compulsion that kept us searching for food coerces us to open emails from Groupon and Appsumo. New shopping startups make the hunt for products entertaining by introducing variability to what the user may find next. Pinterest and Wanelo keep users searching with an endless supply of eye candy, a trove of dopamine flooding desirables. To see an example of how the hunt for information engages users, look no further then the right side of this page. There, you will find a listing of popular posts. Using intriguing images and short, attention-grabbing text, the list is a variable reward mechanism designed to keep you hunting for your next discovery.

We also seek mastery of the world around us. Game mechanics, found everywhere from Zynga games to business productivity apps like to-do lists, provide a variable rewards system built around our need to control, dominate, and complete challenges. Slaying new messages in your inbox stimulates neurons similar to those stimulated by playing StarCraft.

Variable rewards come in three types and involve the persistent pursuit of: rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self.

As B.F. Skinner discovered over 50 years ago, variable rewards are a powerful inducement to creating compulsions.

Graph Search also enables the user to search, for instance, for "photos of my friends taken in national parks" or "photos of my friends taken before 1990".

Tom Stocky, another Google import, showed what appeared to be a market researchers' dream tool: the new feature allows users to ask, for instance, what TV shows are most liked by doctors (Grey's Anatomy, House, The Doctors), or software engineers (Big Bang Theory).

A search for music liked by those who like Mitt Romney revealed Johnny Cash. Obama-likers liked Michael Jackson.

Brian Blau, who tracks social media for the tech research firm Gartner, said the service offered a brand new way for users to experience Facebook. Confined to Facebook's eco-system, the service was not an immediate threat to Google but would gradually increase in importance, he said. "In the future, you know Facebook will figure out how to monetize this. It's going to change the way people think about search."

this trend is not always about skeuomorphism – which implies a connection to a past incarnation of a similar design – but rather often about realism [2]: a purely visual style that tries to imitate real-world materials and textures, exemplified by Apple's tacky over-use of leather textures in some of their own apps.

skeuomorphic designs tend to look realistic (to make the connection with the original object clear), and realistic designs tend to be skeuomorphic (otherwise the realism would look out of place).

touch target couldn't be smaller than a certain size (Apple's Human Interface Guidelines recommend at least 44 by 44 pixels).

showing less on the screen, but doing more with it.

realism done wrong can morph into kitsch

the problem of getting skeuomorphism wrong: making something look like a physical object, but not work like it

That problem is that when borrowing elements from a design's previous incarnation, you often also bring its limitations along for the ride, even when these limitations have no reason to exist anymore

When done right, skeuomorphism and realism will trigger strong associations with real-world counterparts. This is both a strength and a weakness: sometimes, the association can be so strong that it will stop you from improving on what's already been done.

Gone were the shadows, highlights, gradients, and textures of iOS apps. Instead, Metro offered flat squares of color with big typography.

Microsoft's new design philosophy certainly seemed to strike a chord within the tech sphere, with many praising Metro's strong focus on typography and colors.

And while flat design is often purely visual, it does resonate with designer's love of minimalist concepts, embodied by the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupery that “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.

Two of the most talked-about games in recent month, Letterpress and Hundreds both feature flat designs. In fact, Letterpress creator Loren Brichter even revealed that the whole game only uses a single image!

When you have a high-definition display and screen-optimized fonts, you quickly realize you don't need much else to create beautiful work.

is pushing many designers towards prototyping in the browser directly, foregoing static mockups entirely.

Add all this together and you begin to see why many designers are moving away from texture-heavy realism towards the more flexible and lighter-weight flat style.

keep in mind that the needs of users should always come before our aesthetic pursuits

visual style is nothing more than a means to an end [15]. If the situation calls for realism, go nuts on textures and highlights. On the other hand, if a flat aesthetic achieves the design's goal better then it might be time to go on a gradient diet.

With the recent releases of their newer mobile apps, Google has started pushing a style that some describe as "almost flat" [18], or maybe "skeuominimalism" [19]. Unlike the drastic visual wastelands of Gmail or Google Reader, this new style uses elements like shadows and gradients in a tasteful, subtle way. This style offers the best of both world: realism's affordances and subtle hints combined with the purity and simplicity off flat design.

another way to look at it is that it's simply design done right: seeking efficiency and simplicity without sacrificing usability to the altar of minimalism.

I will pick a camp and put my chips in with flat design (specifically, Google's less-extreme variety).

Google is not so much pioneering a new style as showing us what digital design looks like when it's done right

catch up with what the web has to offer, we'll have to get our hands dirty and start coding [21]. And when you're both designing and coding a layout, you start to appreciate the value of keeping things lightweight.

Flat design also forces you to really care about typography and layout, two areas where web design has traditionally lagged behind its more established print cousin.

there is still no reliable way to measure the return on investment. Analytics companies are getting better at tracking whether engaged fans eventually make a purchase decision, but brands are still, by-and-large, forced to look at the number of clicks a brand page feeds to its website.

The ComScore report is littered with the phrase “Fans and Friends of Fans,” signaling the strong emphasis successful brands are taking to cater to the people who can implicitly endorse them to others. If one of your friends is a fan of Starbucks, you’re more likely to be exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook. And if you’re exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook, you’re 38% more likely to make a purchase in the next four weeks.

“The idea behind amplification is that Fans who are reached with brand messages can also serve as a conduit for brand exposure to Friends within their respective social networks,” the report said. “Because the average Facebook Fan has hundreds of Friends, each person has the ability to potentially reach dozens of Friends with earned impressions through their engagement with brand messages.”

“While this research adds weight to the importance of social media, it also brings an important questions to the forefront – are the elevated spend levels among Fans and Friends of Fans the result of the messaging or a predisposition among these segments?

In other words, am I spending more at Best Buy because my friends like it, or because I hang out with people who are into tech gadgets? Am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks in the next four weeks because I saw a friend liked the brand on Facebook, or am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks because I run with people who like Starbucks - whether or not they choose to publicly declare so on Facebook?

Most likely, it’s a combination of both, as well as other factors including traditional advertising and proximity. In my case, I end up drinking more Starbucks than I’d like because it’s the only passable coffee shop within walking distance to my house. It’s a decision that I feel better about, perhaps because so many of my friends implicitly endorse Starbucks by liking the company on Facebook.

the feature offers developers unique opportunities to reach users who have taken specific in-app actions, including in their competitor’s apps. It also gives brands ways to segment and target their fans by the actions they take on their page or a competitor’s page.

Action spec targeting is also interesting in that advertisers can define a “negative action spec,” meaning users who have not taken a particular action. For example, a developer could reach users who have played a game, but not made an in-app purchase in the last 10 days. Advertisers can also reach friends of users who have taken a particular action.

Pinterest shoppers are spending $140 to $180 per order, compared with $60 to $80 on Facebook. This gap became more vast in the days leading up to Easter, as Pinterest users started spending $194 percent (versus $84 on Facebook and $35 on Twitter).

This is not meant to knock Facebook. The social network is great for building awareness and connecting with customers

and Pinterest is better for conversions, since users already know what they want, but are simply discovering where to buy these items. Smart brands that work across Facebook and Pinterest can both build awareness and get users to buy.

If you’re trying to drive awareness and the point of promotion, I think Facebook is highly valuable. Pinterest offers a very different type of exposure.

Share stories visually with photos and videos to grab users’ attention: Posts with photos receive 50 percent more likes.

Page targeting enables page admins to publish stories into the News Feeds of audiences who are going to be most interested in the content, without inundating those who may not.

Use engaging thumbnails for link stories: Links with thumbnails received 65 percent more likes and 50 percent more comments.

Vary your post type — users don’t engage the same way with every post: Mix it up between status updates, links, polls, and photos.

Optimize your page for Graph Search and mobile: Ensure that your page description is complete and up-to-date, which will help its performance in Graph Search results, and pin posts to ensure that users see the most important stories on both desktop and mobile.