To make this feature useful and intriguing enough to interact with, I think that the sorting algorithm needs to get improved. Don’t just sort the stories by their popularity (strong bias toward large companies such as AOL in my case) or release date but factor in the employment dates and penalize stories from/about companies I worked at long ago. After all, I care very little about a place I worked at 5 years ago but I am very interested to learn what is written about my current company or the one I recently left.

I have the feeling that for many start-up employees who used to work at big companies this is going to be a common issue, which could affect the user engagement and adoption of the “Company News” feature . I am curious to see how this feature is going to evolve over time and I hope to see some end user’s controls being added to help fine tune the experience.

Congratulations to Yaniv, Avichai and their team for creating a great product and becoming AOL’s forth acquisition in Israel, following Mirabilis ICQ), Relegence and Quigo.

Read more here: TechCrunch (English) and the.coils (Hebrew)