Thanks for the great article. I’ll be interested to watch where these approaches evolve. Media channels have different purposes, and cater to audiences in very different ways. Influence in any one channel may not equate or support influence in another. For example, having well informed answers on a Q&A site doesn’t automatically give that user recommendation power on where to go or what to buy. Behaviorally, having an advocacy Influence is not the same as being a message Propagator or information Sharer. Should we be building complexity into what we all have been calling Influence, or is it time we start tailoring different measures to the outcomes we need, as well as separating these active behaviors from the segmentation aspects of finding people in the right context?

People have reported them to Klout, Klout has done nothing. Why does this matter? Because they get free stuff. Lots of free stuff because of this. Free rooms at 5 star hotel chains. Free food, free cruises, free shows, free this and free that because of this score.

So, I think unfortunately until these companies can start accounting for the scammers (ie profiles that seem to good to be true and this one has definite indicators such as gaining 20k followers in a month with no public reason for that to be so) They have limited capability.

Also they are too sensitive. If I get sick, or in one case went to China with no access, or Twitter does no feed data (my RTs and Mentions for 2 weeks) my score has know seeming knowledge of the last year and it drops dramatically. There should be a score this X timeframe and an average over X time frame.

So until these companies get better at IDing the spam, the scam and offer some method of dealing w short periods of time where info is not typical I fear they are limited in their capability.

Rather going forward its relevancy and quality of our online transactions which will be of value. In that respect I like the approach of Peerindex which is not isolated to any particular social channel, and takes a broad spectrum to build it’s interest graph.

Much like PageRank with Google today, if one is assigned to the social web, people will try different methods of creating a better rank for their online persona. This may lead to abuse of the system, which won’t help any of the social networks.

It will also be interesting to see if Google uses, or creates, a similar system to help in it’s rankings.

There are couple of privacy levels you can set :
a. default – public
b. private – hide your profile

If you want further privacy, you can set your Twitter stream to private, and not authorise Facebook or LinkedIn or, indeed, anything else.

I decided to check myself out on PeerIndex. I signed in with Twitter. Then they wanted by email because … um, I don’t know why. Then I went to connect my Facebook account and they asked for the following permissions http://flic.kr/p/9nnPKn

Yeah, right.

So PeerIndex has built in a bias against people who care about their privacy. Disappointing. I wonder if they’ve thought about the gender implications of that?