I thought it died a while back..

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bet/2014/05/klout...

Klout is long dead, but Klouchebag lives on: http://www.tomscott.com/klouchebag/.

How is Klout long dead? I opened an account today. So, genuinely confused. Please enlighten me.

Thanks.

Perhaps I should ask whether you think that horsecarts are long-dead as a mode of transportation. They're still legal, and one can still purchase horses, carts, tack, etc. But no more than a handful of people use them on any given day. To me, they're long-dead: still historically instructive, but not economically relevant. Klout is in the same bucket.

At least horsecarts had their day, and took millions of people for a ride to their destination.

Klout tried to take people for a ride, but nobody would hitch their wagon to them, because it was horse shit.

Thank you. That's a helpful reply.

However, I gave up my car years ago and mostly walk everywhere. I occasionally take public transit. Also, I cannot find a supporting article, but my understanding is that horse and cart are still used to help harvest maple sugar because heavy vehicles like modern trucks would crush the tree roots and thereby damage or kill the trees.

So, Klout is dead. Long live Klout.

I shall see if it does any good for me.

Would you consider Myspace to be dead?

Many people would, and the same applies to Klout.

I never really got into Myspace. That answer sounds to me vaguely like "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

So, still in service. It is just passe and not the new kid in town.

(This is an honest attempt to parse your meaning. I swear, it is not dismissive snark. Thank you for responding to my "dumb" question.)

It's much more than that. "No one goes there any more; it's too crowded" implies that the place is so successful that tastemakers look elsewhere, while they're still in fact booked solid every single night. Klout, MySpace, and horsecarts are no longer used by any significant fraction of the population (if they ever were). Of the three, MySpace is actually the most relevant; it's found a modestly sizeable niche (bands). Klout's relevance is at best an order of magnitude smaller and probably much less than that. Horsecarts are still popular among the Amish, Mennonites, and similar sects but in most of the world are no longer used by anyone and have become totally irrelevant. Just like Klout. In neither case is there some sort of anti-popularity bias going on. They're just plain dead outside of a very tiny nostalgic fan base.

No one ever took klout scores seriously. It took many for a ride and unfortunately even Hootsuite fell for the ruse. It was always gamed.

I am not expecting anyone to take my klout score seriously. There is more to the service than that. I am going to give it a whirl and see if there is any value in it for me.

Thanks!

Isn't Klout basically "Twitter followers + rand(20%)"? I only skimmed it, but the paper doesn't seem to directly address how much better Klout is over just going off Twitter followers.

See chart here: https://moz.com/blog/social-authority

No, they count retweets and shit.

If they count shit, it's no wonder Justin Bieber had such a high score.

I don't get it:

"In this work, we present the Klout Score, an influence scoring system that assigns scores to 750 million users across 9 different social networks on a daily basis. We propose a hierarchical framework for generating an influence score for each user, by incorporating information for the user from multiple networks and communities."

why are they "proposing a hierarchical framework". the thing already exists. It's like me proposing we have a vehicles that use four wheels and internal combustion engines.

I thnk it is kind of like coming up with a standard metric that compares cars, trucks, SUVs, hang gliders, trains and horses.

It's more like them "proposing we have a vehicles [sic] that use four wheels and internal combustion engines" while owning 100% of General Motors. There is nothing about this paper that is not self-promotion (and for a totally dead company no less).

That is just how academic writing is.

Obligatory Klout XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1057/.

So are they actually leveraging Klout[1]?

[1] https://klout.com/home

The authors are from Klout, so it's documenting what Klout does, or at least the science behind their decision to do certain things.

Klout is actually leveraging this.

Url changed from http://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/10/30/how-klo..., which points to this.