On Sunday 3.1 million Cablevision subscribers (including myself) faced the prospect of an Oscars-less evening. I found myself wishing a pox on both of their houses as viewers were caught in the middle of a vitriolic war of words between the two broadcast behemoths. My sense is that the two companies got so wrapped up in the short term (and continue to do so) that they have no clue that viewers began casting about for online options and seriously thinking about a day when we can cut the cable and network cords and access entertainment and information directly from content producers. With cable and network television audiences dropping precipitously, do legacy media companies really want to tempt fate?

It’s getting to the point where sooner or later, we’re all going to lose track of where we share stories and websites we enjoy online. Right now, the big guns include Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Del.ici.ous, and we’ll even throw in Google’s Buzz (and Google Reader) for good measure. Keeping up with what your friends are sharing on all of these platforms at all times can be a tall order. But luckily, as of today, ShareThis announced its new ShareThis Stream (currently in “Beta”), which should help tap some of these other sites in order to give you one feed to rule them all (or something to that effect).

You may have noticed the “ShareThis” button we include with every post here at The Digital Breakfast. For those of you who don’t already know, ShareThis is just an easy way to share any blog post or news item you like on/through whichever platform you’d like to share it (email is currently most popular, followed by Facebook and Twtiter).

Right now, ShareThis Stream is a feed that shows you all of the items your Facebook friends are sharing (and any comments made on them) sprinkled with a sampling of popular news items being shared through ShareThis. And you can choose either to view the stream in real time or just watch what’s trending…

You can also filter by source, by just what’s being shared via ShareThis, or by just what’s being shared by your Facebook friends.

If the item comes from a Facebook friend, you’ll get a little “Shared By” line underneath of the item’s content. And if anyone has commented on the shared item, that’ll show up as well…

My friends only share the most interesting stories of political and social import, as you can see.

Plus, for all of the trending topics, your ShareThis Stream includes tweets relevant to the applicable topic…

Obviously it’s not an exact science just yet, but they’re trying, I suppose.

And if you want to share a story that shows up in the feed with others, outside of ShareThis.com, all you have to do is click the “Share” icon you see to the right of the story and you’ll have the option to share a link to it on any of the sites listed, or through email…

Unfortunately, right now ShareThis Stream is limited to things being shared through ShareThis and Facebook. But as you’ll see, they have plans to integrate Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo and MSN. And in addition to your own ShareThis Stream on ShareThis.com, there’s also a ShareThis Stream widget you can gank to integrate into your own site that provides your visitors/readers a feed of the most shared stories.

Personally, I’ve always liked ShareThis for its simplicity and organization. Since its inception, it has continued to provide readers an easy way to share their favorite things on the web, while also providing publishers an easy way through which to encourage readers to share their content. And it’s remarkably easy to use – one click on the “Share” button – another click on your service of choice, and you’re pretty much golden.

Obviously, as the Share Stream is still technically in Beta, right now what you see is what you get. But the concept is there, and with ShareThis’s content base – already automatically pulling from somewhere around 130,000 different sites – as well as Facebook’s 400 million or so users, there should be no shortage of interesting news items for you to ignore…I mean, discover!

We had an opportunity to speak with Vizibility’s Founder James Alexander about this company which is making it easier for individual to customize their own Google results. Essentially, with a few key strokes, Vizibility provides a way for people to compile and distribute complex Google searches. So, if you’re name is John Smith, you can create and distribute a customized search that is specific to you and not the millions of other John Smiths out there. It’s a cool personal branding tool.

Speaking of personal branding, Gotham Media is starting to create and distribute customized, personal branding videos for companies and individuals. It’s a great opportunity to demo your product and talk in-depth about your company. They’ll look something like the Vizibility video. The Startup series will continue and we’re working on aggregating info on as many start ups as we can in shorter profiles, which will remain complimentary.

So even as an iPhone user, I acknowledge that in some ways, Android phones are superior. Or at least they have their advantages like any other mobile device. One of those is the full support of what is arguably the most powerful company in today’s digital marketplace – Google. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m envious of this, but it certainly means reaping the many benefits of Google’s extensive mind share – the latest benefit of which is a gesture-fueled search function.

Now, I realize that “gesture-fueled search function” is a pretty ambiguous term, albeit the only way I could really characterize it at this moment. So, I’ll explain.

Normally when you want to search your phone for a contact, or a bookmark, or an app, you have to use your phone’s keyboard to type that in (or if you’re feeling particularly saucy, you can voice search). Sometimes this works fine, and other times, like maybe if you’re in the middle of a meeting or a lecture and don’t want to call attention to yourself by typing on your phone’s keyboard like a madperson, you might wish there was another way. Gesture Search is what Google believes is the answer to this conundrum.

With the Gesture Search app, you swipe your finger on your phones touchscreen in the shape of the first letter of the contact, bookmark, app, etc. that you’re trying to find. That’ll bring up a list of all of the contacts, apps, etc. that start with that letter. From there, you can either select what you want from the list (if it contains what you were searching for), or you can swipe your finger again in the shape of the second letter of the contact, app, etc. to narrow the results even further. And soon enough, you’ll have what you wanted, without having made too much noise or looking like you’re totally not listening at all in that meeting (even if you aren’t).

But what if your swiping is how do you say, a bit uncivilized looking? Well, for starters, if say your “A” looks like an “h,” Gesture search will give you results for both “A” and “H.” From there, if you want to strike out the “letter” (or what you thought resembled the letter) you just typed and try another, you can just swipe a line right to left on your screen and that will erase the last letter you typed. If you want to erase an entire search, if you’ve swiped more than one letter, you can just swipe left to right to start over from scratch. Or, if you think you might still be able to salvage your search by adding another letter, you can swipe in that letter and see if it helps at all. You can always see a record of what you’ve swiped in the lower left hand corner of the screen as seen in the screen shot below…

And of course the coolest part of this all is that Gesture Search “learns” just like your phone does. So if you search for one contact that begins with “A” more than others, that contact should soon start appearing at the top of the results list while you’re gesture searching.

This actually reminds me a lot of the old Palm Pilots. Not in functionality at all, but just the physical action involved. If you ever owned one of the more primitive Palm Pilots (and didn’t use a keyboard to input all of the information you kept in it), you’ll remember that in order to “type” anything in, you had to use their odd series of swipes that sometimes resembled the letter you meant to type. Obviously they’re not quite the same, and not even used for the same reason, but for some reason, Gesture Search brought that to mind and for some reason I felt the need to share the thought with you.

Anyways, if this sounds like your type of app, and you’ve got a Nexus One or a Droid (currently the only two phones that support it), go hit the Android Marketplace, download this bad boy and get to searching!

And if not, don’t worry. Google’s got plenty of goodies for the rest of us.

One of the reasons I love to read about digital news is that some of this stuff just blows my mind, even when the concept being discussed isn’t so mind-blowing. Sometimes, it’s even just someone’s ability to translate what I might otherwise believe to belong in science fiction into reality. 3D TV, for instance. 3D has technically existed for a long time, but not this kind of 3D – this isn’t the flimsy cardboard glasses with one red lens and one blue lens 3D. I think that’s why Augmented Reality intrigues me so much. Really it’s just a meshing of web content and the real world, which in principle seemed inevitable (especially with rapidly expanding smartphone capabilities). But in practice, who knew when we were going to get so advanced with this stuff?

Anyways, the latest augmented reality app (at least the latest one we’re now discussing) is something called Layar. It’s a FREE iPhone and Android app that puts Foursquare to shame. Sort of, anyway (it actually puts Foursquare to WORK, but hey, whatever).

The central idea is that with Layar, you can point your iPhone’s camera (just using iPhone for the sake of convenience) toward any street scape, and the Layar app’s “layers” will give you information on everything the camera recognizes.

So what do they mean by “layers?” Well, according to Layar, these are like web pages – each containing different info. But that doesn’t really help understand exactly what “layers” are, or at least it didn’t help me. So, I looked a little deeper, and it seems like these layers are grouped by categories including “Eating and Drinking,” “Entertainment and Leisure,” “Government,” “Schools and Universities,” “Healthcare,” and “Social Networks and Communities,” among many others. Underneath each category are what appear to be similar to apps. For instance, under “Social Networks and Communities” you have Foursquare, Yelp, and Wikipedia. So what you can do is – while you have a particular area in your camera’s view, you can cycle through these layers to see what kind of info they have on anything in view. You don’t see what the layers are by name or category, per se, but you do see any of the info they provide, if they do provide info.

Here’s an example from Brightkite.com of what your screen might look like (using the Brightkite “layer”)…

So from here, you could touch any of the little callout bubbles for more information (drawn from the layer) on whatever happens to be part of your view, which will be displayed at the bottom of the screen (like you see here – a picture with the caption “Good beer..5 barrel”).

It works by determining your location, then “retrieving” all of the layer information Layar has that relates to that location – so what info shows up is driven by what info Layar has by virtue of the “apps” that make up their layers (currently over 380 of them).

But despite the fact that I’m writing about it today, Layar isn’t completely new. Some version of it has been around since at least last Summer. It had vanished from Apple’s App Store for a few months while Layar re-tooled, but it is now back in business across all platforms. Apparently, before the iPhone version was prone to crashing.

Unfortunately for me, because Layar uses the built-in compass heavily, it only works with the iPhone 3GS as far as iPhones go. So even though it’s free (which is the best part of the whole app) I wasn’t able to download it and test drive it. But if any of you can get your hands on it and want to give me an idea of how it works, I’d love to hear what you think!

In the meantime, for more info…

Layar 3.0 launched: 5 cases to show the power of the platform [Layar Blog]
Official Website [Layar]

Last week’s panel on the relationship between social media and fashion examined everything from the commercial uses of technologies to building online communities and strategies. Panelists included: Moderator

Peter Fields Partner Roberts Ritholz Levy Sanders Chidekel & Fields LLP

Panelists

David Reinke CEO and Founder, StyleHop Corporation

Matthew Snodgrass Senior Vice President, Digital, Lippe Taylor

Rafe Totengco Designer; CEO, Rafe NYC

Luke Watson Director, Andy Hilfiger Entertainment

Yuli Ziv Editor-in-Chief, MyItThings.com; Founder, Style Coalition

Well, hello Wednesday…where is the week going?

How about a few digital morsels this morning to get us up and running?

Glad you’re with us…

And here I thought it was just because I have A.D.D… [NY Times]

Unlike other android phones, AT&T’s androids (the first ones, anyhow) will be using Yahoo! as their default search engine [PaidContent.org]

Speaking of Yahoo!, if commenting on random mainstream news items is your thing, this will probably put a smile on your face [PaidContent.org]

And speaking of AT&T’s androids, here’s Gizmodo’s review of the first [Gizmodo]

Now, here’s Engadget’s [Engadget]

Yeah, Toyota, Twitter should fix everything… [TechCrunch]

Borderline embarrassing admission of the day = I probably would’ve downloaded this app [TechCrunch]

I’m not sure this is the best name for it, but this touch-interface is pretty cool looking [Gizmodo]

Sony’s $199 “personal internet viewer” is now available for pre-order [Engadget]

2010 may yet be the year of Augmented Reality, but as of Q1, it’s arguably the year of location-based social networking services. As you well know from reading the number of posts we’ve written about Foursquare, the service’s popularity has spread like the plague. And along with others like Loopt, and even Google Buzz (the mobile component, anyway), the movement seems poised to revolutionize the way we interact with businesses, especially restaurants and bars. So really, on any given day, there’s no shortage of news related to these beasts, and today is no different.

The first bit of news is that Citysearch has announced that it’s taking it upon itself to become the definitive Twitter business directory (or something like that). Recognizing that all types of businesses, particularly those in the food/beverage service industry, have been marketing to customers through Twitter, Citysearch is endeavoring to make it easier for users to find informational tweets regarding particular establishments.

What this means for us is several things.

The first, and most visible is the little Twitter module on the front page (and every other page) of Citysearch.com that aggregates tweets from local Twitter users. Second, and probably most significant is like I said before, a directory of all local businesses with Twitter and Facebook accounts (here’s what NYC’s looks like right now). Right now, it only has a handful of the thousands (probably millions?) of businesses indexed, but as they continue to roll this feature out, it should get significantly more robust. And for those businesses who don’t feel like waiting, they can go onto their Citysearch page and actually add their Twitter/Facebook account info on their own.

As a result of this indexing, however, Citysearch has said that the User Reviews for any business with a linked Twitter account will include tweets about the business right above the traditional reviews. At present, it only pulls in tweets that mention the business using it’s @handle, but should in the future pull down any that mention it by name without using its specific @handle.

From a user’s standpoint, this is obviously great. While you can already get tips/reviews from Foursquare, sometimes there you’ll be missing those unofficial “reviews” users share on Twitter. But not anymore. Plus, tweets are constantly updating. So unlike user reviews about the Chilean Sea Bass from three years ago, instead you might see a tweet about that same fish from the same night (thus making it more relevant and useful).

Moving on, another bit of geolocation news today is that Placecast has announced a new location-based marketing service for businesses. They’ve cleverly dubbed this stroke of digital genius, “ShopAlerts.” How it works is that a business’s customers opt-in to receive SMS text alerts whenever they’re near one of the business’s retail locations (or where their products are sold, anyhow). The alert might just be that they’re close by (and presumably an address where you can find them) or, if they’re offering any, deals and sales the business currently has going on (you may have read Monday’s NY Times story on North Face, who is using ShopAlerts). It’s not altogether the hardest concept to grasp, but just for kicks, here’s a video Placecast made that explains the service…

And finally, the last bit of news is that Facebook may be looking to buy one of Foursquare’s location-based social brethren, Loopt. At this point, it’s total speculation (as TechCrunch pointed out). But given Facebook’s inherent interest in online social endeavors, the popularity of these location-based services, and the fact that they’re forcasted to bring in $13 billion in revenue this year, TechCrunch is pretty sure Facebook wants a piece of that pie (which sounds like a reasonable conclusion to me).

Loopt obviously makes a great partner for Facebook in that, in terms of geolocation, they too have been somewhat left behind, but still retain an extensive user base. If Facebook were to buy Loopt, leveraging the largest social network’s user base in conjunction with the largest “check-in” service’s user base, and raised Loopt’s profile anew, they could be a pretty formidable force.

Either way, if they’re going to do it, they better do it soon. Foursquare and others are growing in leaps and bounds by the day. Sooner or later, they’re either going to be so far behind that it’d be a waste of money or they’ll have to spend just as much time playing catch up as innovating.

And the world of digital media marches on …

Here’s a sampling of some of the most recent news we think may be some of the most interesting.

We hope you enjoy!

According to this Pew Internet Report, despite the overabundance of pornography and LOLCats, the Internet actually makes us smarter [CNET]

Citizen journalism just got that much more credible when an anonymous user received a George Polk award for uploading a YouTube video depicting an Iranian woman dying last June [NY Times]

You know things are really bad when a site that helps people find jobs starts laying off it’s own employees [PaidContent]

Round about mid-January, some of the most popular social networking sites saw a “significant” dive in search volume (the number of times their domains were searched for on Google). Is something afoot at Google trends? [TechCrunch]

Last Tuesday, we highlighted TheFace.com’s facial recognition, augmented reality app, which only recognized faces of those people you were friends with on Facebook. Well, if you liked that, you’re gonna love this app that recognizes ANYONE’S face and gives you links to all of their social networking profiles [Gizmodo]

I’ve recently been reminded that not everyone embraces social media as readily as I do. Indeed, there are some people out who don’t “get it” (it, being the appeal) and probably still refer to it as a fad. And hey, if it ain’t for you, it ain’t for you. But I imagine that most of you are like me and you at least have all the major social media bases covered. After all, if you’ve read the Digital Breakfast with any regularity and have read me proselytize my heart out, I have to assume you’re at least an interested party, if not a social media enthusiast.

Anyways, it seems like with every passing month, the social space gets more and more dense. You’ve got your Twitter feed, your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn profile, and probably like 10 others that you at least make an attempt to readily maintain. And if someone wanted to go searching for your musings on any and all of these platforms, it’d take them at least a few minutes and a mess of browser tabs to do so.

Enter, Flavors.me.

Just launched yesterday, Flavors.me is basically a personal homepage for all of your social media exploits. So by that I mean, it pulls in feeds of all of your Facebook status updates, Tweets, RSS from your blog/Tumblr/Posterous, videos you’ve uploaded to your YouTube account, your LinkedIn profile, photos from your Flickr account, your check-ins and badges from Foursquare, and a few other sources, all to one main hub (Flavors.me/YOURACCOUNTNAME). So now, someone can browse all of your mini strokes of genius from one place, rather than searching each one of those sites individually.

And best of all, it takes all of maybe five minutes to set up. You register, create your “About” info (your name, or at least the one you want to appear, along with a short description of yourself), design your profile page (choosing one of three layout options, a color scheme, and a background), connect all of your profiles through the “Services” tab and voila, in less time than it takes to make a bowl of ramen, you’ve got your own social media focused website.

It’s beauty is its simplicity, which coincidentally is also my biggest criticism of it. Not because it’s simple to use, of course, but that the design options it offers are pretty basic. But actually, that’s ok. The point isn’t really to have an elaborate, ornate background (though if you wanted one, you could create and upload it). It’s to make it easy to manage your social media accounts. I just wouldn’t mind if they had more design options out of the box. But as the service just launched publicly, I’m sure it will improve the design options in the future.

So I guess the bottom line is that if you have any more than just a Facebook and Twitter account, Flavors.me would be a great tool for you. Especially if you’re someone who works in the digital world (not just because of the ability to pull in your LinkedIn profile, but that doesn’t hurt). I highly urge you to take a few minutes and set yourself up. You won’t be sorry.