Is Google Alerts Better Than RSS?

Chris over at Download Squad noticed that Google Alerts now allow you to pick videos from the offered alerts. Google Alerts are a way to be notified when someone blogs or writes content about a topic that you select. I love Google Alerts and I know many of the companies I have interviewed use it to keep tabs on what people are saying about their product or service.

For example, I have an alert setup for the keyword "Google" so that anytime something comes out (blog, news, etc.), I get an email notification immediately. And since Google indexes content quicker than we can write it, it’s nearly instant.

So this got me thinking. Instead of worrying about subscribing to every possible feed from a blog or content provider who may write about Google, why not just use an Alert instead? This is similar to the FeedHub product we wrote about earlier this week. In fact it’s almost the same – except FeedHub takes only feeds.

I am by no means suggesting you should stop subscribing to feeds from sites you are interested in. Google Alerts is a great complement and can keep you up-to-date on the topics you care about. When I advise startups and established companies, I always suggest we immediately setup monitoring for the brand or service. If you aren’t doing this already, go do it now.  There are other tools in this area including BuzzLogic.

What would be great if Google created a way to share Alerts so that my setup can be downloaded by Jane and vice-versa. Oh, and a way to create widgets from alerts.