I just got a Google Alert for one of my own Twitter posts.

A week ago, I "retweeted" about a book giveaway on a blog I read, and today, Google alerted me of that fact. Yes, the alert is rather late, considering the tweet is a week old, but it's the first time I've seen it.

The first hint for us that this was happening came Tuesday from a Twitter friend, Spence Smith. Smith, a speaker and social networker extraordinaire, noted -- in a tweet -- that Google seemed to be picking up Twitter posts relatively quickly. I asked him what he meant, and he said one of his tweets had shown up in a Google Alert an hour after he posted it.

Having never heard of such, my boss and I decided to experiment. I set up a Google Alert for anything containing my own name. For a few days, nothing showed up except my daily blog posts for IT Business Edge. So we thought maybe Smith had blogged about the same thing he had posted on Twitter and it was actually the blog post that appeared in the alert (I didn't actually see the alert, of course.)

Today, though, I got my own Google Alert. About a tweet..

Have you seen tweets in alerts as well? Or is this something new that Google has started on the sly?