Thank you so much for creating this incredible social media tool. It is so helpful for tracking down so much information. I’m very glad to help promote it.

I hope you get great feedback from others who are learning about it and using it. I’ve been experimenting with Yahoo Pipes and am constantly amazed at the possibilities.

Thanks!

The difference between the SMF and Google alerts is that the SMF is much more real-time. The speed of Google alerts is dependent on how often Google crawls and indexes websites. The SMF taps into the search provided natively by many social media sites. So every time you load the feed, it goes to a variety of sites like twitter, linkedin, wikipedia etc and performs a search there, and then brings you a de-duplicated, sorted set of results. I hope that clarifies the difference between the 2. In the end, you really just have to try it

And yes, I use the firehose to track mentions of itself.

Google Alerts is good but different. It only reports on search results from Google and Google News, not everything it indexes. The Social Media Fire Hose covers EVERYTHING from a variety of sources that Google Alerts doesn’t always include. I recommend you use both if you truly need to cover your bases.

Thanks for sharing!

Stu McLaren