Social Glass

I was searching for a Google Reader notifier the other day when I stumbled across Google Alerts (I ended up using this firefox extension for the notifier). I read the FAQ and could instantly see the value something like this could add to the “Signals” aspect of the Enterprise 2.0 SLATES meme. Here’s how it works:

1. Enter a search term for a topic that you’d like to be notified of (i.e. “Enterprise 2.0″).
2. Select how often you’d like to be notified.
3. Google will then send you an email with content items pertaining to your topic (videos, blogs, news articles etc.).

Very simple. Very powerful.

Within the enterprise, search is a very under-exploited capability. Why not take advantage of enterprise search and augment the signals capability to do exactly what Google Alerts does - contextual notification. Instead of creating an RSS subscription to the tag “marketing” or to a knowledge worker’s marketing blog, why not let the search engine do the work and determine what is “marketing”? In this way the user does not depend on other user’s tagging ability or new blog posts on the topic. And the powerful algorithms already trusted to deliver relevant search results will be the same used to keep the knowledge worker up to date on a topic in near real-time.