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Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

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Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

#51

Post by dpcheng2003 »

dotBen wrote: post #45
dpcheng2003 wrote: post #21

As a startup founder, let me take the contrarian view on this because I can see how it all went wrong. Klout, for the most part, had a very ambitious goal. Given all our activity (direct or indirect) that is being captured on social networks and general internet activity, there was some inherent value (which we'll call a "clout score") in just knowing who was the "most popular" on these networks. Now imagine you took…

Klout also realized it would never have the granular level of access to the interest graphs on the networks it was - pardon the expression - leaching off of. I remember a senior Twitter staff member pointing out that if Klout really proved a market, they could simply compute all of this information directly rather than inefficiently via the API platform and firehose - with better results from access to more data, and…

Exactly. +1.

Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

#52

Post by dpcheng2003 »

mbesto wrote: post #47
dpcheng2003 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree with your argument because that's not the one I'm making. I think the general consensus from Klout detractors is that a single "score" cannot encompass someone's influence. Some people are more influential in certain circles than others. Of course, there is a broad-based influence score you can apply to people, in the same manner that Super Bowl ads are expensive because they reach a broad-bas…

Any system which one party creates for a set of players will effectively be gamed by a more willing and able actor. > Given all our activity (direct or indirect) that is being captured on social networks and general internet activity, there was some inherent value (which we'll call a "clout score") in just knowing who was the "most popular" on these networks. This as I understand it, is your argument on why Klout sho…

Not my argument. If theoretical Klout existed, it'd take into account all signals (social, search, semantic analysis, weights based on expertise, etc.) to determine the "best" at something--a super pagerank for people search if you will. This should negate individual bias.

Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

#53

Post by dpcheng2003 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #42
dpcheng2003 wrote: post #21

As a startup founder, let me take the contrarian view on this because I can see how it all went wrong. Klout, for the most part, had a very ambitious goal. Given all our activity (direct or indirect) that is being captured on social networks and general internet activity, there was some inherent value (which we'll call a "clout score") in just knowing who was the "most popular" on these networks. Now imagine you took…

Grander vision? Klout should die because it's trying to create a numeric score to measure e-popularity. Why cater to people wasting their life chasing a stupid metric? Better to leave it highly ambiguous. From a geek perspective, I hate social with an intense passion. It drags the politics and power hierarchies of real-life onto the Internet, and reinforces the status quo.

Not what I said at all.

Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

#54

Post by dpcheng2003 »

AznHisoka wrote: post #36
sharkweek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really was a massive and admirable goal. Klout as you described could quickly become one of the most important tools of the web. Instead, people like myself saw humor in gaming the system a bit, so I quickly was in the top 3 "influencers" of ridiculous things, like Whitney Houston knowledge. It is too bad, because when I first heard of the idea, it seemed like a huge step in social media. But I think your right, t…

What's your opinion on BuzzSumo.com and their influencer search?

Haven't used it myself but lots of people I respect like it. Still not "there" yet for what we're discussing but it's a low-friction proxy.

Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

#55

Post by me_bx »

dotBen wrote: post #45
dpcheng2003 wrote: post #21

As a startup founder, let me take the contrarian view on this because I can see how it all went wrong. Klout, for the most part, had a very ambitious goal. Given all our activity (direct or indirect) that is being captured on social networks and general internet activity, there was some inherent value (which we'll call a "clout score") in just knowing who was the "most popular" on these networks. Now imagine you took…

Klout also realized it would never have the granular level of access to the interest graphs on the networks it was - pardon the expression - leaching off of. I remember a senior Twitter staff member pointing out that if Klout really proved a market, they could simply compute all of this information directly rather than inefficiently via the API platform and firehose - with better results from access to more data, and…

> simply compute all of this information directly rather than inefficiently via the API platform and firehose

I'm not sure to understand what you mean here. By directly, I guess you mean by crawling the web ? You're right about the fact that it would give access to more data, but, as Klout measure is people-centric, a social graph API is a more straightforward data source. Associating web pages to unique identity of persons is a challenge of its own.

> Klout were never going to gain the level of access the needed to the graphs on the various networks they utilized

Given their scale, access to twitter graph data should not have been a problem (they have enough users not to be bothered by the API's rate limits). Other social networks are much more trickier indeed.

Full disclosure: I'm co-founding an social media analytics tool providing more granular view of the interest graphs, using twitter as a data source.

Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

#58

Post by mathattack »

dpcheng2003 wrote: post #21

As a startup founder, let me take the contrarian view on this because I can see how it all went wrong. Klout, for the most part, had a very ambitious goal. Given all our activity (direct or indirect) that is being captured on social networks and general internet activity, there was some inherent value (which we'll call a "clout score") in just knowing who was the "most popular" on these networks. Now imagine you took…

Is the issue that it's very difficult to come up with a universal popularity score? It seems like they were trying to find the clique that rules the high school, when in the real world we listen to different people for different things. Of course one score is much easier to sell to marketers than a large series of scores based on different attributes.

The strange thing is - as long as advertisers pay people to Tweet, there is a need for something like this.

Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

#59

Post by crystaln »

dpcheng2003 wrote: post #27
ThomPete wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is contesting the grander vision. The problem is that they sold out, way before they sold out. They slapped together something that might make it for a social media karme engine game kind of thing but not by any metrics any real valuable personification of influence. Besides what everyone else could already see, and even that they got wrong.

I agree. I guess my original comment was not more clear on this. The sell-out was the hackneyed algorithm, not the $200M.

Hackneyed does not make sense here. I'm not sure it means what you think it does. What is your critism of the algorithm?

Re: Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

#60

Post by dotBen »

me_bx wrote: post #55
dotBen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Klout also realized it would never have the granular level of access to the interest graphs on the networks it was - pardon the expression - leaching off of. I remember a senior Twitter staff member pointing out that if Klout really proved a market, they could simply compute all of this information directly rather than inefficiently via the API platform and firehose - with better results from access to more data, and…

> simply compute all of this information directly rather than inefficiently via the API platform and firehose I'm not sure to understand what you mean here. By directly, I guess you mean by crawling the web ? You're right about the fact that it would give access to more data, but, as Klout measure is people-centric, a social graph API is a more straightforward data source. Associating web pages to unique identity of…

No, I don't mean crawl the web. I mean Twitter could just compute the data and calculate the graphs via their direct access to the data. Traversing the full corpus of all data, across all dimensions, including time, including data points not exposed via the platform.

> Given their scale, access to twitter graph data should not have been a problem

Yes, because Twitter could decide it doesn't want to provide the data or do so at costs that make it unfeasible. Like I said, this is the fallacy of the platform economy (which I was quite involved with in its infancy).

If you are co-founding anything that uses twitter platform you should consider what happens if Twitter's biz dev team decides they doesn't want you to exist. This already happened once to the Twitter Dashboards etc.

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