Automatic Alerts created for each Google Contact

The other day I was doing a search for an old friend, someone who I knew pretty well but haven't stayed in touch with these last 5-10 years.  I've moved 3 or 4 times to different cities since then and I was trying to remember the name of the company he helped to start but was having a hard time remembering it.  Since I was already on Linkedin, I search for his name but could not find his Linkedin profile which was weird, but perhaps he never had one or deleted it for some reason.  So next I search thru my Gmail inbox looking for an old email exchange with this contact, and once I found it, I was able to see the company's name as part of his email address.  I then went to the company's website and looked at the "About" section which I remember previously had descriptions of all the co-founders and main principals.  Well when I looked this time, his name had been scrubbed off the page.  There was no mention of him at all on the company website, which again was weird but not too alarming.  Perhaps he sold his share of the business to his co-founders, which is not uncommon.  Next, I decided to do a "google search" for his name, and that is when I came across a somewhat recent (last 3 months) news story with him being accused of a horrible and disturbing crime at the end of 2017.  I was flabbergasted.  I was shocked to see the news about an old friend who I had lost touch with along the way.  And of course, I felt horrible for him and his family to get caught up in such an ordeal, but also embarrassed that I had no idea that it was occurring.

Anyway this whole ordeal got me thinking, and made me realize that I haven't been great at following up with all of my contacts on a regular basis.  Through Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, etc I can keep somewhat connected to their lives from afar.  But when bad stuff happens, very rarely does someone talk about it via their own social media accounts.  And this has gotten me thinking.

I have previously used "Google Alerts" to be alerted to anything newsworthy involving my family members, my past or present employer or specific partners that I'm trying to court.  But creating and setting up to receive an alert is a manual process via Google today.

On the enterprise work side of things, I know that there are tons of social media marketing/scheduling services that also include monitoring for brand protection/reputation management like HootSuite, etc that one can use to create alerts for a list of accounts and/or contacts, but all of your info has to be held within a customer relationship manager database or be uploaded/added to the service provider website I believe.  And they cost money., usually $20-40/mo.  But I've never seen or come across a service that allows an individual to automatically create alerts based on the Contacts in their phone or within their Inbox.  Seems like this can't be too hard to create, right?