Using Google Alerts to Freak Out Friends
At about midnight, my inbox floods with emails. It’s an instrument of my own doing. However, the system I have in place sends me on a daily basis dozens of emails about news or topics I want to keep up to date and people who I’m contacts with. Sometimes, I see my friends appear in stories in out-there publications and I’m able to let them know or wish them a congrats. They might think I’m stalking them, but I’ve outsourced that.
To keep on top of your friends and contacts, there are three easy steps:
- Setup a Google Account if you don’t already have one.
- Go to www.google.com/alerts
- Setup every contact as an alert. For more popular names (e.g. John Smith), you can add the city where they work
As a bonus, if you doing any work with businesses, you can add the business and business contacts to your Alerts. If there was a way to automatically take every person I emailed and automatically setup an alert, that would be fantastic but right now, this is a manual process.
This is an example of AI (if you can even call it that) giving us enhanced abilities. It has the potential of making us more considerate people.
