First, I couldn’t even register - I had to have them set me up. Easy fix, but still.

Second, as you noted, right now selecting alerts does nothing but flood your inbox with news stories that appear to have very little correlation, if any, with the sectors / topics in your profile. (Definitely has country down pat - but, as you pointed out, you get everything!)

Third, there appear to be a number of small bugs throughout the site. I had to update my countries / sectors / topics of interest twice for the changes to stick. Then, after updating the areas of expertise, I clicked on my profile. After updating that, I found that my areas of expertise had been cleared. Then I realized this still didn’t update alerts, which I thought matched areas of interest - so I ended up updating the same information for the fourth time in a row.

Fourth, the purpose of some parts of the site is not clear - even after poking around. For example, what is favorite users for and why does it dynamically change on every refresh of the page?

A great idea, but I’m of the opinion that it’s not yet out of alpha. With more features being slated before the current ones are fine tuned, I’d guess it will be a few more months before it’s really ready for prime time. However, done right, it could definately be a hot spot in the latter part of this year.

Thanks for the follow up comments. I am sure the new information will be helpful for people that use the site and I look forward to seeing the product continue to be enhanced.

I really appreciate you joining the Insight community at its early stage, your comments are of great importance to us at this point to determine how the product is going to evolve.

Apologies for the overflow of news in your daily alerts… Regarding the filtering we are integrating in our next upgrade (next week) a grapeshot technology (http://www.grapeshot.co.uk/) which will improve the relevance of the articles you receive. Hope you see the difference!

We will also very shortly be releasing new features focused on improving users’ experience of the community.
A major emphasis is on facilitating communication between users and letting users create ‘favourites’ and ‘connections’ from the networks.
We will also be adding a leaderboard and a “Today’s Top User” to highlight those individuals who are making the biggest contribution to the community. Polls and blogging features will also be added so the community can make its opinions well known.
These elements will all be released within the next month and we have an extensive roadmap beyond that. But we are of course continuously seeking new ideas fom our users about what they’d like to see next.