Image by Intersection Consulting via FlickrI've written about both Klout and Peer Network before. Both are social network influence rating sites that purport to give individuals and companies an understanding of who the key movers and shakers are in the social network world. The way they do this is by using arcane and possibly questionable math formulas to evaluate people and companies on line interactions and networks and assign a score. My main concern continues to be the fact that I don't believe it is valid to measure multiple sites and somehow generate a single value that is comparable across more than one person. In other words, I feel good about tracking my personal progress but I don't feel good about comparing my Klout score to somebody else's since I may have a total different model of engagement than that other person. By this I mean for example that somebody else might use Facebook and Twitter as public facing means off social networking while I use Facebook only to communicate with friends and family and instead use this BLOG and Twitter as my public facing persona. I'm not going to be sending out thirty or forty updates a day on Facebook because of my use model while a person who is using Facebook as a means of communicating with a wider audience probably will.Setting all that aside for the moment I'm ready to declare a victor, and the race hasn't even been close. Peer Index has always been extremely slow to update. In fact there are portions of my profile that have never updated. I even opened a ticket with them a couple of weeks back and while I did eventually get an acknowledgement nothing has changed as of today.
In the meantime Klout has made regular updates. Like clockwork I can login every day and see what if any progress I've made in raising my Klout score. I might question the science behind Klout's scoring but I don't question the apparent influence they already wield or their ability to execute on their vision.
If my experience is any indicator Peer Index is in a lot of trouble. They are slow to update, slow to respond and are steadily being out innovated and out performed by Klout. This isn't a good situation to be in.
I'm going to keep tracking both for awhile more but at some point I'm going to stop bothering with Peer Index if they don't start to turn things around quickly. They just aren't generating any value for me right now.
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