Change/Twitter/PeerIndex/Klout/FourSquare/Empire Avenue

Twitter is apparently in the midst of a big new platform revision. I still see the previous version no matter how many times I push the refresh button on my browser. Reviews seem to be mixed to negative so far. We humans do not like change though so I always try to wait a few days for things to settle down before assessing how popular a particular change is going to be. From my perspective the current Twitter web client is so mediocre that anything is unlikely to be worse.

My PeerIndex profile continues to be broken. I've had a ticket in for awhile now and I have seen some changes over the past several weeks but the parts that weren't updating still aren't updating and the parts that are updating still seem broken. Meanwhile Klout has been reliable and consistent and continue to role out new features on a regular basis. The most recent that I'm aware of being the addition of FourSquare to the list of sites they monitor in creating their social networking influence score.

FourSquare is one of a number of different sites that incentivize/gamify the act of self tracking our movements. You get points and virtual badges for using the FourSquare app to check into businesses, parks, etc. Some people even add their own homes or the homes of friends. That last bit seems kind of weird/creepy to me but I'm probably a bit old to fully appreciate/understand why this would be appealing. My wife and I have been using the FourSquare App for a couple of weeks now. She's consistently out scored me in part because she was on an extended trip and got to check into a bunch of new places which is how you score best. It's been fun so far but I'm not convinced it will be sustainable. Yelp and Google have similar apps and there are probably others I haven't heard of as well.

Twitter wasn't the only social networking site to roll out a UI update yesterday. EmpireAvenue also made some refinements. The general consensus seems to be positive with most of the changes being evolutionary improvements and refinements. I don't tend to notice a UI unless it gets in my way. There are still areas where EmpireAvenue needs work such as their notification system but they seem to be evolving in a reasonable direction.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles:

• After Foursquare, Klout Adds Blogger, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr And Last.fm To Measure Social Influence (techcrunch.com)
• Setting Your Business Up On FourSquare (businessinsider.com)
• Why are Klout Scores Becoming so Important? (elizabethharmonblog.wordpress.com)

Klout & PeerIndex Followup/Empire Avenue

Th last time I discussed PeerIndex & Klout I picked PeerIndex as the winner in the race between these two social network influence measurement services. It's only been a week or so since that posting but I've had a bit more time to think about this topic and now have more experience with Klout so I wanted to make a few more comments/observations.

First, I'm increasingly doubtful as to the validity of the scores these services publish. I don't have any issue with the concept that you can come up with a score for a single service as there seems to be reasonably good science/math behind that. Where I become doubtful is when those scores get combined. If I bowl, play baseball and play poker is it reasonable to expect that anyone could combine my results in those three different activities into some sort of score that would be comparable to other people who also participated in those three activities? What if there was somebody who didn't care about bowling or poker but was a great baseball player. How would they compare to me if I were mediocre in all three? There are a lot of reasons to want to think that somebodies on line social networking influence could be measured by a single number but at this point I don't believe that is true. That doesn't mean these sites aren't going to be successful even if I'm right. Valid data isn't a requirement for success. Ironically enough, if they are viewed as influential they will be.

Klout was apparently in the process of including LinkedIn to their score when I signed up a couple of weeks ago. LinkedIn was listed but not part of my score as a few days back I got a three point boost after getting an email from Klout informing me that LinkedIn scoring was imminent. Ignoring for the  moment my distrust of these numbers I liked the way Klout went back and recalculated my past several days information so that I didn't suddenly have a big change on the day LinkedIn was added. That made for a  much less jarring experience. I really like the fact that Klout has a strong trending/history component built in.

PeerIndex on the other hand has no history/trending so far as I've been able to tell. I'll just login one day and find my score has jumped or dropped twenty points. These changes are no doubt a result of tweaks to their algorithm but they are very disconcerting. This lack of history isn't surprising since PeerIndex seldom seems to update their data. I'm getting increasingly disillusioned with this. It seems doubtful that Klout is faking this and if they can be as timely as they appear to be than PeerIndex needs to be as well. I'm starting to think I should have given Klout first place when I ranked these two.

There is a third player in this space called EmpireAvenue that I plan on checking out. I'll hopefully have enough information on them in a week or two to comment. Speaking of Empire Avenue, please ignore the following bit of gibberish. It's part of the registration process for their site.

{EAV_BLOG_VER:2a1d6b2899089a73}

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles

• Klout & PeerIndex (Social Network Influence) (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• LinkedIn Users: You've Got Klout (mashable.com)
• Online Social Networking History (Short Take) (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• @Klout vs @PeerIndex vs @EmpireAve- which has the real influence? [Georgina Lester] (ecademy.com)