I was dismayed to see that the plug has been firmly pulled on social media influence ranking tool Klout after 10 years of support for a busy PR and marketing professional who needs to know how free I should be with my information for freelancers (for that read freeloaders).
Although I only achieved a lowly ranking of 44 compared to Barack Obama at 99 and Justin Bieber with the max. 100. It always gave me hope when my activities put me up to a 46 or spurred me on to do more when it dropped below 42. (it was always nice to be able to say I was in my forties when I’m in my fifties).
Anyway, so what? I’m sure Lithium Technologies will be able to charge us even more for their acquisition “to harvest the tool’s artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities for use in other products” and their CEO’s plans to launch “a new social impact scoring methodology”. I will have to use Kred or PeerIndex from now on.
And if anyone who knows me, wants to know their score in May 2018 in the future, I may still have it. It’s stored very securely and you’ll have to prove who you say you are but it was in the public domain once.
Further reading https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2018/may/11/klout-is-dead-how-will-people-continously-rank-themselves-online-now