The Official Klout Blog

For most of the past three months the Klout team has been hard at work behind the scenes. We’ve been building a platform that monitors millions of Twitter users and evaluates each person’s overall influence.  We go beyond overall influence though and look at the strength of influence between every connection on the social graph.  We want to understand whether a person’s influence is wide and shallow or runs deep with a core group of people.  We then look at every tweet and every link shared and run it through our semantic analysis to see if we can abstract out any meaning behind those 140 charecters to begin understanding what topics someone is influential about.

Most of this work has happened behind the scenes and while we’ve been making great strides in our ability to process more data in less time with increased accuracy, our site is looking pretty stale.  It is with great pride that we release our first big change to the Klout website.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that instead of two main navigation tabs (summary and detail) you now have four.  Summary is still the same, but we decided to break the detail tab into “stats” and “content” and add a new “network” tab.

The stats tab now displays the six categories used to calculate a person’s K-score.  Each category contains a number of variables that are measured versus the entire Klout population.  For each variable we provide analysis about how you rank versus everyone else.  If you are interested in trying to raise your influence this is a good way to gain insight into how you are using Twitter.

The content tab shows the tags that are generated by our semantic analysis of the users tweets and links.  Click on the tags to find out who uses that tag the most.  From the content tab you can also see which of the users tweets were retweeted the most and what links they have shared.

The network tab is a geography based visualization of the users influence.  By measuring the influence between each connection on the social graph we can tell you what cities you are most influential in.  This map is just a starting point but if you were going to visit a new city and wanted to know which one of your friends had a lot of “Klout” there and could hook you up, it could be very helpful!

As the title of the post indicates, this is just part I.  Over the next couple weeks we will be releasing a series of new features that will help serve as your personal publishing analytics tool box.  Knowing that there are more exciting features you could build with this data then we could ever possibly get to we are thrilled to also be releasing our public API!

Developers can now visit api.klout.net and start adding influence to their apps.  Most the data used on the site is available through the API.  The rate limit is relatively low but just shoot us an email and we would be happy to work with you to raise it.

Enjoy!