"By now if you haven’t heard of Klout and in a moment of vanity checked your own Klout score, you’re in the online minority. "
I have not checked my Klout score, and indeed until just now had no idea what Klout actually was. When I looked at Klout's homepage, it requires a Twitter account to search for someone. I don't use Twitter and I know I'm not the only one, so I think this is pretty bogus as far as a reputation measurement goes.
I don't know how how this guy has decided that means I'm in an online minority, but I do know that his Bartonphink score just took a dip.
Klout is really just an arbitrary reputation ranking system, just like the Bartonphink system. However the difference lies in what people conclude from an individual's ranking. People use Bartonphink to rank someone on their pertinence to bartonfink. People use Klout to "measure someone's online influence". This is extraordinarily important to businesses looking to do marketing, sales, customer service, etc.
The point I think you are missing is that Klout, and other ranking systems, can give a quick and objective assessment of someone's value or ability in a certain area.
Here's a list of ranking systems and what they indicate:
Klout -> online influence
StackOverflow -> programming expertise
FourSquare -> loyalty to a business
Credit Score -> fiscal responsibility
HackerNews Karma -> ability to provide interesting and pertinent points of conversation
I understand that, Vrish - and I agree. My point isn't with Klout specifically, but rather the author's explicit assumption that I would even care about it and that if I don't I'm in some sort of online minority.
My "online influence" has zero effect on my professional or personal life, and I suspect the same is true for many other software engineers. That's the point I was making, and the author's first erroneous sentence is roughly where I stopped reading what he had to say.
I disagree, for software engineers it is becoming more important to have a greater online influence. Employers are looking more and more at how involved people are in open source projects (eg. github profiles).
People with blogs and StackOverflow profiles public expose how much they actually know about software development. Then when they have a greater following or more points that is a validation that what are saying is accurate.
Unless I'm missing something, I don't see how your twitter influence is important to any job except for paid endorsements.
If I'm hiring an engineer, a project manager, or a designer, I care about their ability to do the job, not about how much they influence their twitter followers.
There are numerous benefits to having someone with social influence work for your company. Say your developer has a large following on Twitter.
- Any problem that they don't know how to solve can be solicited to x number of people.
- If they encounter a bug in 3rd party software that your company uses and publicly bitch about it, the better chance you have to get a timely fix.
- If your company uses/creates open source software, it is more visibile, and there is a greater likelihood that more people will contribute to it.
- They market your company.
- They attract more desirable hires.
When and if Klout (or something like it) becomes as ubiquitous as this article predicts, then we should expect a giant upsurge in inane tweet-farming around professional topics. I don't see how anyone benefits from the world thus created.
Would much rather live in a Klout + Quora world than a Klout + Twitter world.
I have not checked my Klout score, and indeed until just now had no idea what Klout actually was. When I looked at Klout's homepage, it requires a Twitter account to search for someone. I don't use Twitter and I know I'm not the only one, so I think this is pretty bogus as far as a reputation measurement goes.
I don't know how how this guy has decided that means I'm in an online minority, but I do know that his Bartonphink score just took a dip.