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Reporters' Roundtable: Why Klout matters

2012-02-03
I want to ask you about cloud yeah okay are we still taking do you mind I'm sure so what was your this is just take a second you guys can you know chime in on this Josh you love your take two what was your role in cloudy one of the investors of founding desert one in the first money yeah tell me about this and and you know chime in here tubing clout I Isis on honors we are recording and ok and we're broadcasting if you want us to turn it off we will see but I thought this might be an interesting follow up for later yeah of course a separate discussion uh I I have a cloud score of I don't know 64 and I look at it and it goes up and it goes down and I'm like what that why do I care now I will say this i did get a windows phone out of this digit I got one of us but other than that I mean what is cloud and and why is doesn't matter so here's why it so for me social search it was as an investment strategy was interesting so again four years ago I started following things I did aardvark first I loved art walk over exactly so I was one of the angel on that and then I was looking for something else and then Cora popped up which is also really interesting in that space did you put money of course no no I'm just a fanboy and then then a cloud came out and i met joe and it fit exactly with what I was calling people rank and what I mean by that is that the way Google searches is fruit page rank and the links within pages and the algorithm and all of that put together it comes out to what is called page rank and that's a really important part of their algorithm for figuring out what what should be how things should be ranked on the search page again what I was saying is that people rank will actually people's influence will actually matter you know much more in the future of where we're going into social web and mobile etc and we needed something as an algorithm to kind of begin to bubble up clot was the beginning of that Joe got that and for advertisers is actually pretty pretty you know important because for them they want to be able to get to the influencers and we can reach their audience in an effective way so the beginnings of that is I mean the reason you got the android phones because you're an influencer and you know these are pretty classic things they don't change over time it's just the technology is helping us filter and optimize how wait to me though it does seem that cloud is yet another metric of another way for me to feel bad about myself because chasing the numbers is really all I ask you a question let me get those changes perspective here yeah um you also feel bad about yourself if you put in your name yeah your first name and you don't come up first you come up like the tempers yeah you're gonna feel bad about that you're like why why am I not come in at you or if you I have another I don't know other people in the world are like this but I'm years who I am a friend who has a name yeah I won't say his last name is his first name is Jason there's another guy who has the same first class and they're both entrepreneurs and then what happened was one guy's company you know get started getting hot and this you know this thing you know lifted up and became the number one search and he used to be number one and you know that that feels bad right I just made the names up but I mean it what I'm getting at is you also felt bad in those scenarios cloud is just it's it's not a cloud specific problem that's just oh but but but clout distills it down into the essence of I'm not a cool kid that's transparent go ahead put a lot of people hit on cloud because it's not necessarily totally accurate yet but you know they're working for the long term yes it's not perfect yet you know I've even said so in articles my only problem is when they purport it as being very accurate so far accurate enough to say you know a few points in one direction or the other is the difference between someone deserving a perk or not or saying one person is more important than the other I think it's all kind of cloudy still but eventually it will get better and better with time and it will be something that companies can really use but what happens when people start to play to the score I mean you know it's one thing to play to facebook to get props from you know ex-girlfriends that see cool you are whatever is that see me playing the rankings on Google yeah but was all is that always gonna but with clout see with with clout I think that people some people like me uh look at that score and say I need I need to be better than Michael yeah so I'm going to start being more of a smartass on facebook because that cloud measures that yeah or Twitter or whatever and now i'm just playing to the perk it'sit's craven but that's this is human behavior it's I don't think again it's not a cloud thing its humanity and you go your neighbor buys a new car and you're like oh crap I'm not as good as my neighbor I'm gonna go get it you know it's just it that that it's classic all right Josh I agree i think it's a sort of a natural outcome but I you know it's I guess it lady said it's the same as pagerank you can try your best to game it but the whole point is that these algorithms are kept secret so that nobody exactly knows and they change over time so you think you've gained them in one way they discover that you're doing that they change the algorithm and you shoot back down so it isn't it's more difficult to game it then people really just I just picture cloud as a company run by a couple of mean high school girls like he's cool he's not mean girls thanks you
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