Name: Klout.
Age: 10.
Appearance: Kaput.
I heard three nimrods talking about their Klout scores in a bar recently. Does that have anything to do with this? Indeed it does. In fact, Klout was pretty much the “three nimrods sitting in a bar” of social media.
I thought that was Twitter. No, that is 10 nimrods arguing outside the bar. For clarity, let’s say that Instagram is one person kissing themself in a bar mirror and LinkedIn is a businessman touching himself in a pub toilet.
Gotcha. Anyway, Klout was a slightly different social media tool, in that it analysed your Twitter and Facebook accounts for followers, retweets, shares and mentions and then awarded you a “Klout score” – a number between one and 100 – that reflected how influential you were.
OK, great. I have one question. Would that question be, by any chance: “Why?”
It would! Well, that is harder to say. It may be because, in this hard-thrusting digital age, a good Klout score could give you the edge in the recruitment field. Or it may be because people are very needy. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Klout is closing shop.
Oh no! Why? The long answer is that it was acquired by a company called Lithium Technologies, which plans to harvest the tool’s artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities for use in its other products. Also, it may have something to do with the implementation of GDPR.
Is there a short answer? Sure: because it was stupid. Klout took the entire spectrum of human interaction and condensed it to a two-digit number that you could use to bludgeon anyone who failed to adhere to its scoring algorithm. It was tacky and basic and cheap.
Did you have a Klout score? I did.
What was it? A measly 62, even though it said I was an expert in subjects such as journalism, publishing and – oh – Made in Chelsea.
What does it mean now that Klout has died? It means we have entered a more sophisticated age of interaction. We have come to realise that the infinite richness of the human condition does not easily lend itself to the kind of cold, hard, robotic quantification that Klout offered. Make no mistake, this is a beat of the drum. A loud, organic beat that says: “We are still here and we are more beautifully complicated than you could ever know.”
Really? Well, it also means that Lithium Technologies is planning to bring out “a new social-impact scoring methodology based on Twitter” very shortly.
Do say: “Klout is klosed.”
Don’t say: “No wonder you are happy. You are such a 46.”
