I've been trying Google Alerts for a little while, punching in the usual set of vanity searches and the names of some friends just for the fun of it. Every day, Google sends me mail letting me know about new matching search results. I'm finding it quite a lot of fun, despite the extra load on the ol' inbox.

MSN Alerts, on the other hand, tell you what's going on with your eBay account, MSN Calendar, and a few commercial services I find quite bizarre but which I'm sure will be greatly appreciated by their respective target markets (e.g. "Juicy celeb gossip").

I think Microsoft could have a lot of fun, here, with almost no effort: just let us subscribe to Live search results via RSS (not just put them on our Live home page), let MSN Alerts subscribe to arbitrary RSS feeds and let us know of new items via Messenger (in real-time) and mail (daily or weekly), and also add some hook-up to optimise direct alerting of new search matches. Let a thousand mashups bloom!