
What Your Klout Score Really Means - ldayley
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/04/ff_klout/all/1
======
pg
Ron Conway's score of 48 is the reductio ad absurdum of this algorithm.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Klout is better than what came before it, but there's considerable room for
improvement.

There's demand for this product, just needs for someone to get it right.

Klout feels like MySpace waiting for Facebook to come along.

~~~
redthrowaway
It's likely noone will ever see this, but it looks like what they need is a
PageRank equivalent. Klout is AltaVista, counting numbers of followers and
retweets. What they need is to be Google, distinguishing the _true power_ of
their connections. Google's key insight was in realizing that a link from the
NYT was _better_ than a link from geocities. Klout could do something similar,
building a weighted social graph with the value of a given node determined not
only by the number (and directions) of its connections, but also by their
importance.

Ron Conway is more important than some "social media expert", because of who
takes notice when he talks. The social media expert may have 100k followers
and 5k retweets for every inane tweet, but Conway's utterances filter through
the Internet's data channels, finding their way to other important people, TC,
Forbes, etc. It should be relatively straightforward to judge the impact a
given person has, and so make their Klout score more significant.

------
michaelpinto
i had a friend who once observed that the more productive she was the lower
her clout score -- i've since taken that to heart and see it as a measure of
inverse productivity.

------
Casseres
I have no scientific basis to back this up with, but here's my hypothesis:

The higher your Klout score, the lower quality of your connections/posts.
Klout mostly cares about quantity, not quality.

The way Klout is going to make it's money is by identifying good evangelists.
The best evangelists are not necessarily the best content creators (eg. Justin
Bieber)

------
apu
It's nice to see that the PR industry is not suffering in this economic
downturn.

