
Twitter Has A (Secret) Reputation Score For Every User - obilgic
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/17/twitter-has-a-secret-reputation-score-for-every-user/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
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dotBen
When I went to the launch/welcome party for Klout in the building for Twitter
HQ, I invited a Twitter employee friend to "come down from the top floor" to
check it out.

He walked in and said "yeah we have this internally already, these guys are
fucked".

I think the idea of a reputation score around your twitter account makes total
sense, and is definitely a marketable product. And the Klout team are a great
bunch of guys.

But when Twitter offers it there is no real point to a 3rd party option which
is going to be inherently less accurate.

Yes, Klout now calculates Facebook authority too but unless you have created
an account and linked your profiles its meaningless _(and what %age of folks
have done that?)_. Klout dodged a bullet today in that Twitter didn't announce
this info going into the API, but I don't think that's far out...

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urbanjunkie
"inherently less accurate"?

I can see that there's potential for Twitter's offering to be good, but no
guarantee that it's perfect.

'Reputation' is a nebulous concept, and Twitter certainly don't have a lock on
how it's defined and calculated. Who knows which centrality measure they've
chosen, how they're valuing and determining influence, or any number of other
measures. The main advantage they have is of being closer to the raw data (and
potentially better access to the entire data set, although a rigorous sampling
methodology could take care of that)

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dotBen
_"The main advantage they have is of being closer to the raw data"_

That's my point. Both companies have the ability to come up with the most
amazing formula for working out reputation but applied equally, Klout is going
to be "inherently less accurate" because they have to trickle feed the data
via the API and many interesting data points that may be stored in the Twitter
database are not exposed on the API.

Twitter has direct access to all data points.

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urbanjunkie
Like what though - if you have enough information to generate a social graph,
and you have access to the firehose, then you're going to be have what you
need. Social scientists will often use a sample set as a very acceptable proxy
for full data set analysis
(<http://www.insna.org/PDF/Connections/v18/1995_I-1-9.pdf>)

There's little evidence that the Twitter guys have come up with an
outstandingly amazing reputation algorithm and that this niche has been
filled. The opaqueness of Klout doesn't fill me with confidence that their
methodology is valid or truly meaningful.

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abraham
Really TechCrunch? You are surprised by this?

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arfrank
That was my response too. It's like when Apple revealed their iPhone testing
labs. Obviously these companies have internal tools/stats that people have no
need to know about, but definitely make their company better able to perform.

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protomyth
The iPhone testing lab story at least had some cool pictures.

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Xuzz
I'm also guessing this is used in the Top Tweets algorithm, which seems to
favor lesser known users in the amount of interest needed to get chosen, but I
have no way to back that up.

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bkudria
If this news is surprising to you, you should rethink your mental model of,
well, the business of tech startups.

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joshu
one assumes that this is just the converse of a spam score...

