@Alex Schleber you took the words out of my mouth. Getting Google alerts piped into Friendfeed is an awesome options 6 months ago I might have suggested Google Reader but I rarely use that now Friendfeed has become my control panel. Friendfeed’s filtering and UI make it much less work. Especially in comparison to email.

Rich Schefren has a Reputation Manager which adds a couple of services to the list http://www.strategicprofits.com/tools/reputation-monitor/ (You could get the opml file and copy the searches into friendfeed).

Another tool worth a mention is the Yahoo Pipes mashup Social Media Firehose http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose (which can be piped into Friendfeed)

You can see where this is going!

Lastly there could be some value in this video by Mike Elliot about using Friendfeed as a search tool http://deepfriendfeed.tumblr.com/post/115820426/is-friendfeed-the-best-content-search-tool-on-the-web

Thanks for your thoughts gents.

I would add that you can actually grab the Google Alerts as an RSS Feed as well once the individual keyword set-up is created, which you can then import into the same FriendFeed room you describe under Step 2. ( I actually just added this to one of my own “listening post” FF rooms.)