Facebook announced to advertisers that it has gotten better at measuring its own 20 percent rule — the guideline that an image advertisement can contain no more than 20 percent text.

There are two things that don’t count against the 20 percent rule: Pictures of products that include text on the actual product Photos of products in real situations or photos of products with a background

the percentage of adults using the social networks of Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter or Instagram to communicate with each other is now at 73%, and Facebook — the world’s largest social network with 1.19 billion users — remains the most popular in the U.S., with 71% of U.S. adults using it.

That’s four percentage points up from last year’s 67%

inkedIn — site that bills itself as the “professional” social network focused on networking, job hunting and professional information and news — is hanging on at number-two, with 22% of U.S. adults using it — up 2% on last year. Close behind it is Pinterest — which has vaulted over Twitter to number-three position with 21% usage.

In Europe, according to research from Gigya, content-sharing via Twitter is almost as popular as via Facebook—unlike in any other region in the world. Facebook was the winner in every region of the world, according to the Q3 2013 study of clients using Gigya technology to facilitate sharing. Only in Europe did Twitter come so close to Facebook’s lead

Of the social networks used by UK seniors, Facebook is the clear winner. A Kantar and TNS Omnibus survey conducted in July 2013 showed 18% of UK consumers ages 65 and older used Facebook. However, usage was considerably lower among this cohort for Google+ (6%), LinkedIn (4%), Twitter (3%) and even more scant for other networks. In reality, the vast majority of seniors (74%) said they used “none of these,” a negative response rate considerably higher than for any other age group studied.

seniors’ Facebook penetration is expected to decrease between 2014 and 2017, suggesting that some will choose to no longer use the platform.

When it comes to Facebook penetration among UK seniors who are social media users, the index will be much higher, at 96.4, in 2014, and will then dip slightly to 95.2 by 2017.

The next generation of search, he said, is all about making “all your tasks as you go through the day simpler and quicker.” That also means that in a large number of cases, you will interact with Google on something that may not even have a screen. The car, he believes, is prime real estate for the Google Search of the future, where you simply interact with the search engine and then engage in a conversation with Google. The living room, too, he believes is a place where Google should just work. That may be on a large screen, but maybe also just through microphones and speakers that wait for your “ok Google” command.

Gibson Security, a group of anonymous hackers from Australia, has published a new report with detailed coding that they say shows how a vulnerability can be exploited to reveal phone numbers of users, as well as their privacy settings. “Snapchat has a feature where it will grab all the numbers from your address book, upload them to their server [which is pretty bad by itself] and suggests you friends,” a spokesman for Gibson Security told Guardian Australia. “We discovered that if you were to go through and scan single phone number through this find friends function you could essentially obtain the phone number of a Snapchat user.”

Two years ago, the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time got obliterated by a computer called Watson. It was a great victory for artificial intelligence--the system racked up more than three times the earnings of its next meat-brained competitor. For IBM’s Watson, the successor to Deep Blue, which famously defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov, becoming a Jeopardy champion was a modest proof of concept. The big challenge for Watson, and the goal for IBM, is to adapt the core question-answering technology to more significant domains, like health care. WatsonPaths, IBM’s medical-domain offshoot announced last month, is able to derive medical diagnoses from a description of symptoms. From this chain of evidence, it’s able to present an interactive visualization to doctors, who can interrogate the data, further question the evidence, and better understand the situation. It’s an essential feedback loop used by diagnosticians to help decide which information is extraneous and which is essential, thus making it possible to home in on a most-likely diagnosis. WatsonPaths scours millions of unstructured texts, like medical textbooks, dictionaries, and clinical guidelines, to develop a set of ranked hypotheses. The doctors’ feedback is added back into the brute-force information retrieval capabilities to help further train the system.

For Watson, ingesting all 2.5 million unstructured documents is the easy part. For this, it would extract references to real-world entities, like corporations and people, and start looking for relationships between them, essentially building up context around each entity. This could be connected out to open-entity databases like Freebase, to provide even more context. A journalist might orient the system’s “attention” by indicating which politicians or tax-dodging tycoons might be of most interest. Other texts, like relevant legal codes in the target jurisdiction or news reports mentioning the entities of interest, could also be ingested and parsed. Watson would then draw on its domain-adapted logic to generate evidence, like “IF corporation A is associated with offshore tax-free account B, AND the owner of corporation A is married to an executive of corporation C, THEN add a tiny bit of inference of tax evasion by corporation C.” There would be many of these types of rules, perhaps hundreds, and probably written by the journalists themselves to help the system identify meaningful and newsworthy relationships. Other rules might be garnered from common sense reasoning databases, like MIT’s ConceptNet. At the end of the day (or probably just a few seconds later), Watson would spit out 100 leads for reporters to follow. The first step would be to peer behind those leads to see the relevant evidence, rate its accuracy, and further train the algorithm. Sure, those follow-ups might still take months, but it wouldn’t be hard to beat the 15 months the ICIJ took in its investigation.

Pinterest, the web's fastest growing content-sharing platform

The It Girl of social networking isn't just full of mason jars and wedding dresses—as the most repinned material from 2013 shows, Pinterest is a place to plan travel, learn about tech, find workout inspiration, and bookmark the cars of your dreams, too.

Earlier this month, Facebook noted that pages could see a decrease in organic reach as a result of News Feed algorithm tweaks that favor newsworthy posts. However, many marketers and Facebook page admins are reporting that they’re seeing an extreme drop in organic reach — as much as 44 percent in some cases — and it has been going on for months.

Komfo, a social marketing firm, studied fan penetration among 5,000 Facebook pages of various sizes from August through November with the following findings: 42% decrease in fan penetration 31% increase in viral amplification 28% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR)

In Komfo we do not doubt that the survey shows that there is no “free lunch” on Facebook anymore, and companies have to start investing in Facebook advertising if they want to reach the right audience with their content. However, it also shows that the Facebook’s algorithms, that control what we see in our newsfeed, have been improved. Facebook has become better at showing a page’s content to the most engaged users. Jim Tobin, President of Ignite Social Media, also saw significant drops in organic reach. In a study of 689 posts of 21 large brand pages found that in the week of Facebook’s announcement, organic reach dipped an average of 44 percent. Tobin pointed out that the previously accepted reach percentage of 16 percent can now be as low as 3 percent.

The parallax style has excited web developers and inspired any number of hype lists. It's also triggered a backlash among critics who feel its bells-and-whistles approach detracts from actual content. Pitchfork creative director Michael Renaud recently told the Atlantic Wire he expects people to "tire" of the trend within a year or two.

the parallax site was only superior in one sense--fun. None of the other survey measures indicated a significant difference in user experience between the two sites. Parallax didn't even edge the standard site in questions about visual appeal (although participants did think it looked slightly more "professional"). Frederick also discovered one critical disadvantage of parallax: test participants who suffered from motion sickness found the style disorienting.

Sobering as this first careful study of parallax might be to web designers, Frederick still believes it's a fad with a future. He cautions developers to think more carefully about the context in which parallax is applied. Text-heavy sites that employ parallax scrolling seem more likely to disorient users, he says. Sites that emphasize visual elements--images, infographics, or data visualizations, in particular--are probably a better fit for the style.

For scale and economic reasons, more advertisers will create their own content and simply use publishers as distribution systems. And, effectively adapting the custom experience to mobile is a must next year, if it isn't already.

In 2014, the mobile Web will die. That’s right, that bastardized version of the normal Web will crawl into a shallow grave and leave us all in peace. No more websites crippled with horrible “mobile.yourawfulwebsite.com” URLs. No more reading janky websites that display way too much fine print or omit crucial features when viewed on your smartphone or tablet. 

The mobile Web will die because the companies that make the engines it ran upon are killing their mobile browsers and replacing them with fully functional versions that run on any device. In 2014, these browsers will be updated to put the final nail in its coffin. In turn, developers will continue to build websites that can work across any screen size. Responsive design (what we do at ReadWrite to make the site look pretty everywhere) will continue to grow in 2014 as people realize that their old websites are losing them a lot of traffic from mobile devices.

Location-based consumer apps didn't let me down; as predicted, they remained stagnant this year. Foursquare and its kindred just are not hot anymore, even if Foursquare did just raise a funding round this week.

Two technologies this year will be integral to smartphones' next evolutionary step: Bluetooth Low Energy and Wi-Fi Direct. 

Among all the networks and specific centers in our brains, there are three that are known for being used in creative thinking. The Attentional Control Network helps us with laser focus on a particular task. It’s the one that we activate when we need to concentrate on complicated problems or pay attention to a task like reading or listening to a talk. The Imagination Network as you might have guessed, is used for things like imagining future scenarios and remembering things that happened in the past. This network helps us to construct mental images when we’re engaged in these activities. The Attentional Flexibility Network has the important role of monitoring what’s going on around us, as well as inside our brains, and switching between the Imagination Network and Attentional Control for us.

1. an idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements 2. the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships

Preparing your brain for the process of making new connections takes time and effort. We need to get into the habit of collecting information that’s all around us so our brains have something to work with.

Durante os últimos seis meses do ano, 78 por cento dos inquiridos portugueses geriu o perfil numa rede social, face a 68,3 por cento da média mundial, e 91 por cento visitou a página de um amigo, superando também os 78 por cento do ponto de vista global.

Relativamente à interação com as marcas, 48 por cento dos internautas portugueses revelaram que usam as redes sociais para conhecerem as novidades alusivas aos produtos, 38 por cento para exporem uma situação pessoal ou apresentar uma reclamação e 34 por cento para solicitar ajuda ou conselho.

o estudo conclui que os consumidores tendem a ligar-se a marcas respondam a cinco necessidades básicas: relacionamento, diversão, aprendizagem, progressão e reconhecimento.