I’m an avid XKCD reader, and today’s post made a reference to a new service called Klout. I’ve checked it out, apparently it has some algorithm that measures your following on social networks and assigns a score from 1 to 100 based on your influence in the social network sphere (facebook, twitter).
My response was like Randall’s (the author of xkcd): I don’t want to participate. I’m sure my score would be horribly low, and I think the whole idea feeds a sort of popularity contest of social network competition that defeats the core purpose of the web - which is to connect people in ways that they couldn’t before.
What are your feelings about this? Has anyone found it to be a useful tool?
Klout has been around for a while and at first I was curious, but when I checked it out and saw that I was influential for the term ‘sad panda’ which I have never used and have no intention of using, I wrote it off. I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise if anyone has something positive to say.
I’ve have seen Klout being used as a useful tool — as a way of tracking the effectiveness of social-media strategy in organisations that are particularly new to social media.
For individuals it appears nothing more than an ego-stroker perhaps, but for the aforementioned I certainly wouldn’t write it off.
I received several invitations to try Klout through Facebook. I tried. I find it quite useless. I would much rather depend upon the viral feedback I receive from my friends and followers rather than an application’s opinion of their opinion of my posts.
Klout was famous previously but now it has lost its prominence. One good aspect with klout is that it shows the results which are true results. It eliminates all the spam and inactive social accounts and this is how you get the actual results. However the effectiveness of klout remains in question.
