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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

by dotBen 16y ago

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...

urbanjunkie 16y ago
"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)
- dotBen 16y ago
  "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.
  - urbanjunkie 16y ago
    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 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.

by dotBen 16y ago

urbanjunkie 16y ago

"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)

dotBen 16y ago
"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.
- urbanjunkie 16y ago
  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 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.