Klout's Score Drops to Zero as It Announces Plans to Close Down (gizmodo.com)

Once upon a time, Klout had 100 million users, Gizmodo reports. But now... You probably haven't experienced the crippling anxiety of thinking about increasing your Klout score in quite some time. As of May 25, you won't have ever have to do it again. On Thursday, the social ranking company announced to its 708,000 Twitter followers (meh) that it will be shutting down.

Klout was founded in 2008 as a way for social media users to gauge their "influence." Through some algorithmic voodoo the service would snoop through your social media presence and spit out your "Klout Score" -- a number between 1 and 100 that determined how much you are worth as a social human being.
Lithium Technologies (Klout's parent company) annouced that their acquisition "provided Lithium with valuable artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities but Klout as a standalone service is not aligned with our long-term strategy."

But Lithium also announced plans to launch "a new social impact scoring methodology based on Twitter" sometime in the future.

Comments

Re:Funny thing

[phantomfive]

They had 15 minutes of fame when they first came out, as people went to check their score. Then when most people realized they didn't have much clout (as is true of 99% of us), we went back to our lives and ignored them.

People who have influence know it, and don't need to measure it. People who don't care don't care. The market for Klout was a small sector of people who wanted influence but had no fucking clue how to get it. Almost any activity you can do, including posting on Slashdot, would be more beneficial than the time wasted checking your Klout score.