People have been hired and looked over for a job because of social influence. One service of such, is Klout, and it is definitely an odd thing. It thinks BlackBerry users are more important than Android users. Weird? Odd. Stupid. In truth, these rankings don't intuitively seem to make much sense.
Now, there's some evidence to support that claim. Mark Graham from the Oxford Internet Institute went to "map the service in order to see how the geography of online influence (according to Klout) might vary over space." Here's how he did it:
Over the course of four consecutive days of polling for 30 seconds every 5 minutes from Twitter's spritzer-level of access, we collected a total of 3,598,060 geotagged tweets via the random public timeline. These geotagged tweets were then bundled into their respective countries of origin, and the resulting set of country-bundled tweets were sampled randomly for up to 1000 users. The resulting sample of users were queried using Klout's API.
Graham plotted the average Klout score for each country by color coding the map so that darker blue corresponds to a higher score. According to him, France scored an average of 37.8, and the second and third spot belong to UK (34.9) and Sweden (34.8) respectively. What do you think of Klout score? Is it all hogwash? [Mark Graham Image by Mark Graham and Devin Gaffney]
