With News Feed inventory, FBX ads are in Page Post Link format, meaning they’re much bigger than before, and they get prime real estate among posts from users’ friends and pages. Additionally, News Feed-based FBX ads include options for Likes, comments and shares, which could lead to other types of engagement or even virality.

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.

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

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.

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”.

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.

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

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

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.

all of the trends we're kind of bored with now — social, local, mobile, big data — have laid the groundwork for the realization of anticipatory systems' promise.

Foursquare, for example, has been collecting years of data about where people are and what places they're interested in — not just their explicit check-ins, but their local searches, tips and likes. So far, that's allowed Foursquare to offer personalized recommendations. But now the company is taking the next step into anticipating users' needs, Foursquare's head of search, Andrew Hogue, told Fast Company. Hogue gave the example of giving users recommendations for lunch spots at 11 a.m., rather than requiring users to type "lunch" into a search.

calendars are a perpetual act of optimism, subject to real-time revision by factors we can manage — like self-discipline — and factors we can't, like traffic and transit delays.

At present, Google Now’s cards are actually quite limited, covering only: Local weather - for both your current location and your work location Local traffic information - including to your “next likely destination” Public transit information - when you’re near a transit stop, it tells you what bus or train will come next Your next appointment - and how long it will take you to get there Airline flight information - including delays and how long it will take you to get to the airport Sports results - for your favorite teams in real time Information about nearby places - bars, restaurants and other attractions Translation services and currency conversion rates - when it nows you’re in a foreign country Time at home - when you’re in a different time zone

The advantages of the Google ecosystem boil down to one term: convenience. Are the results and help you get from Google Now worth sharing the deeply personal information involved? That’s a personal question for each user of devices with Android 4.1, but it’s important to remember that Google still collects all this information whether or not you use Google Now. It’s just that the new service makes it impossible to ignore just how much the company knows about you.

Perhaps that explains why the millennial generation is picking up the practice of handwriting notes to send through the mail. Or today’s paper renaissance: The global stationery and card market is expected to reach $111.8 billion by 2016, a 25 percent increase since 2011

objects that hearken back to different times strike an especially strong chord today, particularly among digital natives. "Embracing Analog" is a digital-era countertrend—a response to the evaporation of so many physical things into intangible formats. For consumers, these responses coexist with their embrace of tech-centric lifestyles; indeed, the stronger that embrace, the stronger the urge to experience the polar opposite.

The further from email the better, with letterpress-printed cards and embossed papers especially popular.

These things represent a counterpoint to our always-on, real-time world of bits and bytes. They appeal to our urge to de-tech, as they follow a different, manual pace.

They also appeal to our search for “authenticity.” Increasingly, it’s the “imperfect” that feels especially authentic—a counter to the standardized, mass-produced or otherwise polished offerings that prevail today and the smooth, shiny surfaces of our digital devices. Imperfections on physical objects, such as scratches or scuffs, give them personality, according to 59 percent of our survey respondents, with millennials (67 percent) and Gen Xers (60 percent) leading the way.

In this age of authenticity, face-to-face will trump face-to-screen interactions. In a separate survey that JWT conducted a few years back, we found that 63 percent of American adults wish they could spend more time communicating with friends and family in person rather than through technology; again, the digital-centric millennials (70 percent) were more apt to say this than Gen Xers (61 percent) or Boomers (57 percent).

The combination of automated agents, contextual search and a sea of data from our devices, services and the Internet of Things, search is poised to become vastly more useful and efficient than it already is. The pieces are getting there with agents like Siri and contextual search like Google Now. If it all works as promised, information we need will be delivered to us just when we need it, without our having to invest time and effort looking for it.

. Since last summer Facebook has most notably rolled out Custom Audiences and Partner Categories as ways for advertisers to be able to target users based on marketers’ customer databases and people’s offline purchase behavior. Sandberg said the first quarter saw more than twice as many marketers using Custom Audiences as used it in fourth quarter '12.

More targeting options should quicken the growth in how much each ad costs, given that typically the more targeted an ad is, the higher its price. In the first quarter, the average price per ad ticked up by 3 percent

The ratio of Facebook’s monthly users that return to the platform daily continued to creep up, hitting 60 percent in the first quarter. While some may scrutinize the one percentage point quarter-over-quarter uptick as indicative of Facebook’s daily user base beginning to stagnate, 360i’s vp of emerging media David Berkowitz said that any publisher that sees more than 50 percent of its monthly user base returning daily is "pretty phenomenal."

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.

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

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.

In the latter block, each division might have a different class name or perhaps different additional classes applied. This allows for greater flexibility in rearranging them in the layout. In the first block of code, the three content divisions will always reside inside their parent container.

With CSS, we have the ability to rearrange blocks inside a container. We don’t have the ability to break content out of one container and move it inside another container. If you want more mixing of blocks, then you’ll need fewer containers.

there are currently far more instances of websites that are dropping columns wholesale

Every element is its own unique block and serves as its own container. The page’s main heading is its own contained block. All of the meta information is inside another container directly below it. After that, every paragraph, subheading and image is also its own self-contained block of content. The same goes for anything else that might end up in a post, such as a block quote or code block.

a challenge to how we think about structuring our HTML, particularly to how we use containers. Elements can’t move from one container to the next. We can fake it with complex CSS, or we can rewrite the HTML with JavaScript; but, ultimately, if we want to intermix elements, we’re best of using fewer HTML containers to create columns. Instead, we should leave more of our content blocks in their own containers and use CSS to create virtual columns in the layout. This solution doesn’t confine our elements to structural containers and instead enables us to more easily rearrange the elements in different layouts.

In the UK, users peaked at 28 million in October before declining to 26 million in March according to Nielsen data on home and work users. As of March, the Facebook website had no more UK users than it did a year ago, suggesting that its expansion has plateaued.

The firm counts the number of individual browsers on the Facebook website using any type of device, but it cannot count the numbers of people using the Facebook app. Nielsen said an app user would have to access the full website only once a month to register in its numbers.

On Sunday, the Guardian reported that Socialbakers, which produces Facebook traffic estimates for advertisers, had recorded falls in monthly visits in the US and Europe

the company has said that in developed markets, the number of users accessing from personal computers is falling, while traffic from mobile devices is surging. By Christmas, more than half its visitors – 680 million a month – were using mobile devices. Nearly a quarter of Facebook advertising revenue is generated by the small screen.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg told investors last year: "Someone who uses only our desktop product has only a 40% likelihood of using Facebook on a given day. But someone who uses mobile has a 70% likelihood of using Facebook on a given day.

Facebook made $219m in the first three months of the year, compared to $205m in the year-ago period.

Mobile ads accounted for 30% of total advertising revenues in the first quarter, up from 23% in the fourth quarter of 2012.