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I was one of the first 10 employees at Klout. The initial core idea was good: To hold big brands responsible by empowering ordinary people to be heard and reco
by jaytaylor 8y ago
I was one of the first 10 employees at Klout.
The initial core idea was good: To hold big brands responsible by empowering ordinary people to be heard and recognized as influential on social media.
From the inside, it was an amazing journey. Definitely the most fun job I've had so far in many ways. So much technical freedom to do whatever we wanted (yikes ;), and so many parties!
The team was also high caliber. Good engineers, good biz dev, marketing, everything. Many of my former colleagues continued on to greatness, from serial entrepreneurs, to one who's now the President of AOL. :)
After I departed in 2012, the public interest seemed to die down, and hockey stick growth along with it.
Sad to see it shutting completely down, always thought it was a cool idea. The amount of controversy just from putting a score by someones twitter handle remains incredible! It really opened up my eyes to how much subtle product decisions can manipulate users (for better or worse.. it's up to the PM).
At the same time, the way twitter caters to narcissism bothered me then and still bothers me now. Would've been the best if we'd found a way to dial down the narcissism and turn up just the Whuffie [0]!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie
- pixelmonkey 8y agoI'd read that blog post! Share it when it is up!
- jaytaylor 8y agoI think it'll have to be broken up into a series. Here is the first one: https://jaytaylor.com/klout/spotify.html https://jaytaylor.com/klout/spotify.html
- madeofpalk 8y ago> The initial core idea was good: To hold big brands responsible by empowering ordinary people to be heard and recognized as influential on social media. How was this ever in any iteration of the product? From day one it was always that vanity metric of your "Klout Score". The entire product was focused around that. Hell, there was even the allure of a partner program that gave discounts and offers to high-Klout scoring users. If that's not catering to people's narcissism then I don't know what is.
- scblock 8y agoIf that was the "initial core idea" it was never implemented. It was narcissism from day one.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoWhuffie: I remember when Tara Hunt described it for the first time on stage. I was there. Quite an interesting concept.
- dawhizkid 8y agoAlmost certainly Klout is shutting down at this moment because of GDPR, which means they probably have been selling user data for a long time and/or stored PII insecurely and accumulated too much tech debt over the years to be able to do anything about it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rmason 8y agoSorry but I didn't find it that compelling. A year after signing up I received an email saying my score went up. So I took the bait, logged in and found my score had not only not gone up but I was pretty sure it was lower. A month later I received another email saying my score had gone up, this time I had logged my score just to be absolutely certain. Sure enough my score had gone down again! After that I marked the Klout emails as spam. Any company that has to lie to their users to get them to log in has already failed even if the end comes years later. I think the game was to goose the metrics so they could get another round of financing. The goal should have been a focus on making the product more compelling. Short cuts rarely work in the long run.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- codeonfire 8y ago"After I departed in 2012, the public interest seemed to die down, and hockey stick growth along with it." lol. Are you trying to imply you were the life of the party? And Klout's business model was clearly pilfer everyone's data from other sites that were "linked."
- jaytaylor 8y agoNot trying to imply that at all, I'm just one person! And not even a real party animal. I believe the timing was purely coincidence.