Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The New Standard for Twitter Abuse

You may be familiar with Klout. Klout assigns a score to each user based on their social media presence, ranging from 0 to 100, to try to measure how influential they are. But is any of Klout's information valid or meaningful?

It seems that Klouchebag would argue that no, it isn't, and that in fact Klout's numbers "are pretty much a crapshoot." Klouchebag is a sharp and sarcastic commentary on Klout's clout that calls itself "The New Standard for Asshattery" and uses a measurement it calls the ARSE (Anger, Retweet Abuse, Social Apps, English Misuse) rating system to determine how much a twitter user is abusing their tweeting powers. While it doesn't cover all of the social media tools that Klout claims to take their measurements from, and it doesn't claim to be completely accurate, it does provide a lot of viral entertainment value. Plus, it's a great resume builder for Tom Scott, its creator, who mentions at the bottom of his page that yes, he is looking for work.

What do you think of Klout? Do you think that Klout ratings carry importance online, or that Klout ratings don't carry much weight?