Four digital trends to watch out for:

The Information Age is over, now is the time of the experience age.

Our mobile devices are driving this shift by changing how we connect with one another. The information age was built on the foundation of the desktop era, information accumulation, exhibited in our digital profile – That our identity is only the sum of all the information we’ve collected and stored in our profiles.

The experience age, accumulated information has taken a back seat to continual self-expression through our connected mobile cameras televising every moment of our lives.  In the experience age we are breaking the information hording habit and defined by fluid instants.

Today the feedback loop connecting sharing and attention starts and ends on mobile; in the future, it could start with contact lenses and end in VR.

Further Reading: TechCrunch , Engadget

Apps are the future of TV, but its not the Apps you think, its Social

Traditional TV is by no means wiped out, but it is suffering. Streaming may have overtaken it as the method of choice for content, but traditional live TV is still holding on to its most valuable commodity, Sports.

That is until recent news that both Twitter and Facebook are moving in to stream NFL games for 2016 season. Networks are taking note and experimenting with launching shows designed for these platforms. This is an enormous shift for platforms that were built on UGC to move to content providers, but it could become all the advertising a show could need – to know that your friends are tuning in.

Further Reading: Wired – Dailydot – LA Times Business – LA Times Entertainment – Variety

Web Brutalism – A return to the handmade web.

There is a current trend in web design that balks at the industry’s best practices of user-friendly interfaces and returns to methods of imperfect, hand-coded HTML with influences of ‘90s graphics. These methods are employed by some of the most popular and most used sites on the web and recently the term, Web Brutalism has gone viral after the site was picked up by Hacker News.

This movement is being lead by Pascal Deville, Creative Director at the Freundliche Grusse Ad Agency in Zurich, Switzerland.

“It’s not only what you can see, it’s also how it’s built,” Deville explained, of the submissions he selects as emblematic of the style. “… In the code you can see if it’s really a streamlined application or it’s a very rough, handmade, HTML website.”

Further Reading: Brutalist Websites – Washington Post – Washington Post

Messenger Apps are the future, but they won’t just message.

Facebook reported that it’s Messenger App hit 900 million users that collectively send 60 billion messages each day. This encapsulates a growing trend, Messaging apps now have more active users than social networks.

These messaging apps won’t just message. The Al-Powered Facebook M, is forecasted to enable users to make purchases, restaurant reservations, and travel bookings within the messaging interface. WeChat in China already offers this kind of ecosystem to its users, where the messaging app houses all of these abilities and much more by allowing platforms developers to build their own sites within the app.

Why are messaging apps taking off so well, as Techstar’s Director Alex Iskold describes it “We created a new way to ask questions, and receive an answer via computer that is a lot closer to how people do it in real life.”

Imagine Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tinder, SnapChat, Whats Up, Tumblr, Venmo, Groupon, Uber and Amazon are animals; WeChat is the forest where they live. It is more than a social media app; it’s an ecosystem for Messaging, Content, and Commerce.

 Further Reading: Techcrunch – Techcrunch – Quartz – Investopedia