Google News Alerts Now Grabbing Content From Twitter

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I could hardly believe my Outlook in box this morning. For obvious reasons, the term “mitch joel” is set as a Google News Alert for me. I prefer to receive Google News Alerts via email because when I am on the road, I can grab a quick glance via my trusted Blackberry.
I was shocked to see this one from last night:
Mitch Joel: Power Within Ottawa comes to a close. Back home in Beautiful Montreal. My brain is fried. I’ve met/talked with too many great people today.
Twitter / Mitch Joel – http://twitter.com/mitchjoel.
Yup, Google is not only parsing and indexing results from Twitter, but it is considering it Google News Alerts worthy. This is a powerful paradigm shift towards acknowledging all content as news worthy.
Twitter – what some are calling a micro-Blog or as I called it: “Twitter Is To Blogging What Post-It Notes Are To Notebooks” – gets some serious street cred as far as I’m concerned when it gets this Google-worthy.
I was so not convinced of Twitter when I first saw it a month back, but as the days troll on and the conversations take on more and more sustenance, it’s becoming clearer what Twitter offers in terms of personal branding, leveraging networked markets and other social media realities. We’re connecting in ways we’ve never imagined possible and Twitter has begun the process of intensifying just how closely connected we all truly are.
I’m wondering if the concepts evolving out of Six Pixels of Separation (the book, not the Podcast) should be renamed Six Twitters of Separation. If you thought we knew too much about individuals because of Blogs and Podcasts, Twitter will, literally, melt your brain.
Does anyone else find it fascinating that, at this moment, I know exactly what people like Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Steve Rubel are doing? Oh, I know this because they are telling me.

7 comments

  1. is this really google innovation? is google really acknowledging the power of twitter in terms of microformat, all-news-is-qual, etc?
    or did googles crawlers just stumble across some new RSS, which it treated like all the other RSS is consumes?

  2. In fact, I do not find it fascinating, I find it frightening and somewhat sad.
    We’ve gone from exchanging reasonably thought-provoking thoughts in blogs, to exchanging mind-numbing trivialities on Twitter like obsessive pre-teens. We (the collective) need to seriously step back and think about the value of a technology before we blindly jump on board and trumpet its greatness without a moment of critical thought.

  3. I’m with the last poster…as much of an RSS- and web 2.0-fanatic as I am, I’m still drawing a blank on the usefulness of Twitter…seems to be more of a teenage wonder type of thing to me…not much use day-to-day for us techie professionals.
    Can someone show me the light on why I should bother to constantly update a website with what I am doing right this minute?
    To make it easier for some snooping government agency or crazed stalker to know what you’re doing/where you are minute-to-minute, perhaps?

  4. I think i see why Moe was unable to find the news item on Mr. Joel.
    Google news alerts can come in different categories. You can get news alerts, or news alerts with blog alerts for whatever search term….and the blogs and news items will show up in the same news alert email.
    Mr. Joel undoubtedly had signed up for both, so he saw a news alert that had blogs and news in it.
    I work with google news all the time, and receive different incarnations of various google news alerts. The blogs and news items show up in the same email, but they are cordoned off and prominently defined as in the news category, or the blogs category.
    I think Mr. Joel got a wee bit too excited with what he found in his mailbox. I also did a search on his name in google news and found nothing. I did the same search in google blog search, and found lots of him.

  5. If you choose Google News Alerts and then the “comprehensive” selection, you will get results from Blogs and Twitter.
    As a media person, I see no reason why anyone monitoring their company or competitor would not take the “comprehensive” selection.
    I was not talking about searching on “Google News.” I was posting about “Google News Alerts” which is a completely different tool.
    I hope this clarifies it… oh, and I also think it’s crazy that Google News Alerts are parsing results from Twitter.

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