So what does a high Klout score actually get you? The influence-measuring startup already offers prizes through its Klout Perks program, and there are bragging rights (unless your friends think you’re a loser for caring about your Klout score). Now Klout is asking users who are influential on a given topic to answer short, factual questions through the new Klout Experts program.

It sounds like the program won’t be rolled out to every user today, but when it is, you might Klout and be prompted to answer a question like “What is the best way to care for tulips?” or “What is the best place to take your date in the city?” You’ll have 300 characters with which to offer your answer. (Why 300? Co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez said 140 characters isn’t always enough, but he wanted to keep the answers direct and to the point.)

Fernandez told me that Klout is working closely with Bing on this feature, so if there are relevant answers on Klout, they’ll be featured prominently when people search for a given question on Bing. Fernandez said the search engine team is also suggesting future questions that Klout could ask its users. At the same time, while Klout doesn’t have the same cozy relationship with Google, the answers should show up there, too.

For now, Fernandez said he expects most of the Klout Experts traffic to come from Bing, but you can also browse the content on the Klout site itself. The company will be highlighting recent answers from your friends. Fernandez also suggest the on-site experience will improve over time. For one thing, he said users’ various answers to a single question are currently being sorted on a single page by human editors, but Klout is working on a voting system where people can endorse the answers they like — though you can only vote if you’re influential on that topic.

Fernandez suggested that this could eventually integrate with Perks and Klout for Business — for example, businesses could start asking their own questions and offer Perks for good answers.

When he described the new feature to me, I asked if people might think he was basically turning Klout’s user base into a content farm. Fernandez countered that these answers are going to be tied to people’s real identities, and emphasized that they won’t be able to post unless they’ve got a good score.

“What we’re good at is understanding the quality of engagement,” he said, adding that Klout scores are “a really good fitness function” for ensuring that people will create high-quality, useful content.

But why is Klout getting into this business at all? Well, Fernandez argued that Klout has become “the standard” in measuring online influence, so now it can start building other applications and uses on top of that system. Klout Experts is the first example of that.

“Influence and reputation is our platform,” he said.

Nonetheless, he also acknowledged that creating the feature has been a bit of a shift, pushing Klout to hire people who have more experience on the editorial side and with user-generated content: “How do we get people from Yelp versus Google Analytics?”

The Experts program is currently focused on technology, food, music and travel. You can view some sample answers here and here and sign up for early access here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Klout, the service for measuring online influence, is boosting its integration with both Bing and Instagram today.

On the Bing side, the news follows last fall’s announcement of a strategic investment from and partnership with Microsoft. That announcement included the unveiling of a feature in Bing that would show Klout scores for select people. (And Bing continues to surface more data on that front.)

Now Klout users can add Bing to their Klout accounts. It sounds like that won’t have an immediate effect on their Klout scores, but according to the company blog post, “Bing search data will start becoming integrated into Klout’s algorithm” and “search results will eventually factor into each user’s Klout Score.”

I was a little confused about the timing of events here (perhaps because I’ve only bothered to add Twitter and Facebook to my Klout profile), but a spokesperson explained that this sort of staggered integration is normal: “Before we are able to incorporate any data into a person’s score, we need users to connect the network to Klout so we can begin to process the influence data. So, with Bing, we are now asking people to connect it to their accounts, and eventually search data will actually factor into their score.”

The spokesperson also confirmed that this is the first time Klout has integrated with a search engine.

Speaking of that staggered integration process, starting in 2011, Klout allowed users to add Instagram to their accounts, and now it’s ready to take the next step, incorporating Instagram activity into your score. So talented photographers whose photos get a big response on Instagram should see their Klout go up.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Happy anniversary to me: I’ve now been writing this here weekly column for exactly two years. Over the last year I have opined, prescribed, and predicted many things. And now, like last year, as part of my one-man crusade for greater opinion-journalism accountability, I’m going to take a moment to go back and look at what I got right … and where I went horribly, hilariously wrong.

(cracks knuckles)

OK, then: without further ado, and leaving out posts too recent to be judged or those that didn’t contain forward-looking statements, let’s see what I said over the last 52 weeks, and why…

Eyes In The Skies

I appear to be mildly obsessed with drones and ubiquitous surveillance technology, so every few months I write about their potential repercussions, the apparent inevitability of a transparent society, and the dire need to ensure that we’re talking about one-way, rather than two-way, transparency. See, for instance:

• Droning On With A Date Towards Destiny? Drones. Drones drones drones.
• For Those Who Don’t Want To Believe. Why online pseudonymity is important.
• Surveillance. Two-way transparency, dammit.
• I Have Seen The Future, And Its Sky Is Full Of Eyes. Printable insect drones.
• Move Along, No Panopticon To Be Seen Here. Really.

Was I excessively paranoid? This here Danger Room post can be neatly summarized as a two-word answer: hell, no. The future is here, and more than a little terrifying.

Dubious Cheerleading

• About a year ago, I wrote: I Believe In Google Plus (even though I hardly use it myself.) At best, the jury’s still out on this one. On the one hand, Google announced some impressive numbers at their I/O conference, and Hangouts seem to be a hit; on the other, it’s clearly not yet even the Pepsi to Facebook’s Coke, and they haven’t rolled out near as many features as I would have expected. We’ll see.
• I also wrote — shock! horror! — Sing Now The Praises Of Klout’s Klumsy Kludges, in which I predicted that something like Klout, albeit not Klout itself, would one day be huge. People do seem to have largely gotten over their visceral hatred of everything that Klout stands for, and the site was receiving more than 1 billion API calls/month as of May, but a service that will be to Klout what Facebook was to MySpace hasn’t really erupted yet. Give it time.

Long(ish)-Term Thinking

• In The Decline And Fall Of The Appian Empires, I wrote: “the HTML5 is on the wall for native apps. They’ll continue to reign through 2012, and maybe even 2013; but make no mistake, their days are numbered.” Then Facebook changed their mobile apps from HTML5 to native. Er. However, at TC Disrupt, Mark Zuckerberg said: “It’s not that HTML5 is bad. I’m actually, on long-term, really excited about it.” So let’s check back in 2014.
• Then I predicted In Five Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones. A recent report indicates that smartphone penetration has already hit 41%(!) in Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, which seems awfully high, but if true bodes very well indeed for my prediction (indeed, makes it seem tame and slow). We’ll see.
• In Whither, Hollywood, Wither? I predicted “As Hollywood hikes ticket prices, and fewer and fewer people attend theaters every year, eventually they’ll hit a point at which the cultural cachet and social buzz of going to see a movie seems less and less worthwhile to more and more people.” We’re not there yet, and as a hardcore movie buff, I actually hope I’m wrong on this one…but I don’t think I am.
• In Heads Up! This Was Google’s Apple Moment, I declared “Google Glass isn’t just a new product, it’s a whole new product category, and it has every chance of being every bit as revolutionary as Apple’s Big Three.” (Words eerily echoed by the NYT’s David Pogue some months later, I note.) We’ll see, but I’m feeling pretty good about this one … except that this was also a panopticon post.

Fish In A Barrel

• In So Long, And Thanks For All The Quantum Research, I predicted that RIM was doomed. That increasingly appears to have become the conventional wisdom.
• In Freight Train Kept A Rollin’, I declared 2011 the year of Android, and said it was going to roll on. And I got Mary Meeker on my side.
• In Save Helpless Faraway Africans From The Comfort Of Your Home! I called Invisible Children’s viral Joseph Kony video “meaningless feel-good armchair activism at its worst.” It’s hard to believe today that that was a controversial opinion.
• In Apple’s Patent Win Is Bad For Us All and Google Granted Pseudonym Patent (You’re Welcome. And, What Is Wrong With You) I took the Big A and the Big G to task for participating in the monstrous swamp that is the world of tech patent litigation, because it’s bad for everyone. And as of this week, even Apple might have reason to start agreeing with me…

Egg On My Face

• Do I sound all self-congratulatory? Let me clear that up for you. In Bashing Facebook For All The Wrong Reasons, I wrote that Wall Street’s focus on Facebook’s most recent earnings report was ridiculous, because “Facebook’s long-term upside has nothing to do with its expected earnings over the next year or two. It’s believed by many to be extraordinarily valuable not because of its advertising income but because it has a real chance of becoming a company unlike any that has ever existed before, with the possible exception of pre-breakup AT&T.” So far so right. But then I suggested that they had a long-term income-generating gold mine in … Facebook Credits. Which they then discontinued all of two weeks later. Sigh. Thanks, Zuck.
• Then, in What Happens When Pollsters Are No Better Than Psychics?, I made a very specific prediction: “Nate Silver will find himself writing about how and why the election results varied so much from the poll numbers leading up to it.” And I was absolutely, completely, 100% wrong. To be clear, as I said on Twitter:

I'm not surprised Nate Silver's analysis was dead-on, but I am surprised the raw poll data was still collectively so accurate.—
Jon Evans (@rezendi) November 07, 2012

I actually thought Obama would win bigger because plummeting poll-response rates meant they undercounted his voters. ( techcrunch.com/2012/08/25/wha…)—
Jon Evans (@rezendi) November 07, 2012

I Dunno, I Dunno
I lump these together because, in retrospect, I think that probably one of these is true, but not both; in fact, they might well be mutually exclusive.

• In Double Hubble Bubble Trouble, I worried that we were in a bubble: “Software is eating the world. The Internet is changing everything, for everyone. But these sea changes don’t happen anywhere near as fast as true believers think.” Now I’m beginning to think that I was wrong. Of course, classically, a bubble really begins to inflate when even former skeptics capitulate and give in to irrational exuberance. So does thinking that I was wrong mean I might have been right?
• What worried me even more, though, was What If Technology Is Destroying Jobs Faster Than It Creates Them? And I’m even more concerned about that today. If so, it’s good for me, and probably for you. But for the world, at least as we know it? I’m not so sure.

On the whole, I give myself a B- for the year’s prognosticatory accuracy. It might have gotten up to B+, though, if not for that meddling Nate Silver and Mark Zuckerberg. I leave you with the image of me shaking a fist in their general direction.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Online social influence is something that can really rub people the wrong way. Klout obviously believes in it wholeheartedly; others, not so much. Now, in a move that’s sure to generate its fair share of criticism, Klout has updated its iPhone app with Passbook support, allowing users to create their own “Klout Card,” which lives in Passbook and can help users “show off [their] influence to get special service and experiences” from businesses.

Klout hasn’t said much about where or how exactly that will work, or what businesses are signed up to recognize it, (we’ve reached out to them for more info, and will update accordingly), but the card will include your user name, profile photo and Klout Score, so that you can tell anyone anywhere that you’re kind of a big deal on web-based social services. I’m having terrifying visions of people flashing these things at social outings to try to settle debates about who knows more on any given topic. Please don’t let that happen.

Other features of the update include iPhone 5 display optimization, as well as notifications for Klout Perk eligibility and the ability to claim right from your iPhone. But let’s be honest, this is all about the card, which for Klout could be a way to get more local businesses on board with its brand and potentially its Perks platform.

Update: Here’s some more info from Klout’s official blog post on the iOS app update, which details all the new features. Still, no specific details on how the new Klout Card will work in practice, or at what establishments.

Perks on Your iPhone

We’re excited to announce that as of today’s release, you will be able to discover and claim Perks directly from your phone. Our updated iPhone app will notify you when you are eligible for pre-qualified Perks, and then allow you to claim that Perk immediately, wherever you are.

We’re also taking our iPhone experience a step deeper by including a full integration with Apple’s new Passbook. Using the updated version of our app, you can add your “Klout Card” to Passbook, which will display your name, photo and Klout Score all in one place. With your Klout Card, you can show off your influence and get access to special services and experiences from the businesses you love.

Perks around the Web

A few weeks ago, we released the KloutPass SDK, which allows partners to authenticate and register users with Klout. Today we are announcing that 500px—a Toronto-based photo community that lets you discover, share, buy and sell photographs—is the first partner to embrace our KloutPass SDK. Based on your Klout Score, you can receive savings off of your premium 500px account, up to 100 percent. More information about the 500px Perk is available here.

Perks on Klout

Finally, these new Perks avenues are accompanied by updates to the Klout.com Perks experience. We believe that everyone’s influence is unique, thus your Perks will now be more catered to you than ever before. They are also easier to claim and share with your friends, and will allow you to add yourself to a wait-list if you happen to miss something you like. So whether it’s a free Burt’s Bees gift pack or a spot at the open bar at next week’s Cadillac red carpet event, don’t forget to keep an eye on your inbox to see the Perks we have for you.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over the weekend, I wrote a post about Salesforce telling potential job applicants that one of its “desired skills” was having a Klout score of 35 or more. Needless to say, I found this to be a bit unsettling, as I instantly imagined other companies forcing this into their own job applications.

Whether you agree with what Klout does or not, and for the most part, I don’t, it’s a hot space. I’m not a fan of “class systems” and people feeling good or bad about some arbitrary score.

As soon as my post was published, Klout’s CEO, Joe Fernandez, tweeted to me about how HR people are using Klout at companies. I asked him to come to our office and discuss it with me, and he graciously accepted. I also got to ask him about the rumors that the company had manually adjusted scores for people who complained loudly that theirs was too low.

Have a watch:

Klout is most certainly a lightning rod, and at least Fernandez isn’t backing down from a good argument or discussion.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Let’s put it out there right now: I am personally not a fan of Klout, which ranks people based on their Internet interactions and engagement on services like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. I have nothing against the company whatsoever, and this is a vertical that someone was going to get into sooner or later.

However, I still feel like the whole concept is bunk.

I came across a tweet by Klout CEO Joe Ferndandez the other day and it really bothered me:

Love this Salesforce job posting looking for someone with a Klout score above 35. ongig.com/jobs/Salesforc…

—
Joe Fernandez (@JoeFernandez) September 27, 2012

This is something that I’ve feared for a long time, that companies would seriously consider a candidate’s Klout score before hiring them. I understand doing background checks to make sure that someone isn’t a convicted murderer and checking on a GPA to get an idea of how someone did in school. Fine, I get that. However, since nobody really knows how Klout scores are calculated, these numbers mean absolutely nothing to me.

Why should they mean something to a company like Salesforce? I have no idea. The job that Salesforce was hiring for was “Community Manager.” Some have argued that looking at someone’s Klout score is perfectly reasonable since that person should have a firm grasp on how Internet services and social networking works. However, in my experience, the smartest marketing, customer service, and community folks don’t really use these services to build a “personal brand.” They just do good work.

You see, what we know about Klout is that they consider your online activity, like tweeting, in a way that is only somewhat scientific. The system was gamed in the past and will probably be gamed in the future. Based on who follows you on Twitter, who tweets at you, what you tweet about and who retweets you, your Klout score goes up. That means that you spend a lot of time tweeting from your own personal account, which doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a focused, hard-working team player.

Let’s take a look at the Salesforce job description, and just so you know, these positions have been filled. So, sorry. First, the video at the top of the job description:

Ok, so this guy is a pro. He wants to hire the best. I get it. Here’s the snippet of the job description that mentions Klout (notes are mine):

Desired Skills:
- Knowledge and use of social media/social networks considered an asset (Of course, good thinking!)
- Ability to work independently and as a part of a team (Definitely. Smart ask.)
- Experience with Radian6, video, photography considered an asset (This is pretty smart to ask for.)
- Klout Score of 35 or higher (I’m sorry, WHAT?)

Make no mistake about it, whether you hook up your social presence to Klout or not, the company is collecting a ridiculous amount of information about you. Valuable information, in fact. This is information that is “sold” to companies to give you “perks” and rewards. Klout calls it targeting, but I call it creepy.

When it comes to hiring someone, I find it absurd to even mention something like Klout in a job description. In fact, if someone has worked in this industry for a while, they shouldn’t even consider working for a company that has a job description like this. At least, that’s what I would advise. It’s a lazy metric to look at, it’s unscientific, and it gives Klout more power than they deserve.

Again, great people work there, but this is just getting into very dangerous territory if you ask me. If someone doesn’t know what goes into the algorithm that makes their Klout score, it will always feel too low to them. They will always feel like less of a “professional” since other people have higher scores. That’s bullshit, because people can do awesome things when you least expect it.

Will Salesforce hire Community Managers with a Klout score less than 35? I don’t know. Can someone even have a Klout score lower than 35? I have no idea. Is this legal? I don’t know. Should it be? I don’t think so.

Just so you know, my Klout score is like 80 and I don’t know what it means. The hiring manager at Salesforce in that video above? 64. Does that make me smarter than him? More talented? Should I replace him? Should he be replaced by someone with a higher Klout score? NO! Of course not. Because it’s a worthless number.

That number won’t be worthless if companies jump on this bandwagon, though. I am warning hiring managers, don’t do this to yourselves. Don’t be naive. Don’t put so much trust into one metric from one company. Do your due diligence and find the BEST people who will be a great addition to your team.

Numbers are numbers, people are people. People make companies win.

P.S. Using tools on the Internet isn’t rocket science, but being a real asset to a company is.

[Facepalm Photo Credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Klout hasn’t just defied influential tech pundits, its social reputation scorecard has won them over. Now the sometimes-controversial startup is aiming at search. The startup has just signed a strategic investment and partnership with Microsoft that, on top of new funding, will create a product and business relationship with the Bing team.

You’ll begin seeing Klout scores — the combined measure of a person’s influence across Twitter, Facebook and other social networks — show up in the search engine today. The initial implementation will show Klout scores for friends in the “People Who Know” section of the right-hand column, alongside other third parties already in there, including Twitter and Quora. Search for a hot topic like “Facebook advertising”, you’ll see people with socially-proven expertise showing up. Mouse over an expert’s name, and their Klout score will appear, along with their Klout-determined areas of expertise.

Meanwhile, search data in Bing will now begin contributing to Klout rankings.

For now, experts will get a boost in Klout whenever they show up in “People Who Know” for queries. But raw search data will also become part of the mix. ”Let’s say you write an article,” Klout chief executive Joe Fernandez explains, “and that article appears when somebody does a search, then the user clicks through. We’ll associate that click with your [Klout] name.”

Klout users who have Wikipedia entries associated with their accounts will also get Klout boosts for the number of times that those entries show up and get clicked on in search results.

For Microsoft, this is another move to define itself as the “open search platform” — a term that Bing corporate vice president Derrick Connell used repeatedly during my briefing call today. As with the Facebook, Twitter, Quora and even Google+ integrations, Klout helps position Microsoft as the more open and socially-attuned alternative to Google’s still-dominant search product.

The deal today isn’t exclusive for either party, both sides confirmed with me, so maybe we’ll see Klout start becoming a factor in Google rankings. But so far the search giant has appeared more focused on using Google+ data to power social relevance in rankings.

Klout, meanwhile, gets traffic and brand marketing from yet another big name, and money (both funding and revenue). I don’t have the exact terms, but this type of relationship reminds me of Microsoft’s now-legendary strategic investment/partnership with Facebook back in 2007.

Speaking of Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg has recently started talking about expanding his company’s own efforts in search. But both Bing and Klout use Facebook as a core way for determining relevancy in their services (you’ll even have to sign in with Facebook to get access to the Klout integration). I have to wonder if there’s any friction emerging here between the companies? Anyway, for now, this looks like a mutually beneficial win for all parties versus their shared enemy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s of note to mention that BlogFrog has developed a platform that would not be possible without women bloggers.

The newly available platform has a network of 100,000 “social influencers.” Women represent 95% of that community. These are women who write about parenting, food, health, fashion and home and garden.

It’s with this network of women bloggers that BlogFrog has built what it calls an end-to-end influencer marketing platform that brands use to develop social marketing campaigns that connect blogs, brand sites and their properties on social networks.

On BlogFrog, bloggers are tracked and measured according to their social media influence. BlogFrog’s technology platform tracks the posts that bloggers craft.

Comments are managed through a BlogFrog widget that allows moderation and distribution of reader comments. Blog posts and reader comments can  then be distributed to the customer’s own web page which is usually a branded asset of some kind that is marketing consumer products.

Customers of BlogFrog’s software as a service (SaaS) get reporting on the campaigns through a realtime dashboard that tracks impressions, unique visitors, reach, links, social actions (votes and likes), replies, clicks, and shares.

Shifts in society have forced marketers to interact differently than they did in an age when there was no online medium for women to express themselves.  As noted in a recent BlogHer study, women bloggers say writing a blog gives them a fuller sense of self. That’s true of many bloggers I know.  If you believe what you write then it is only natural for it to have an impact on the way you view yourself. What these women bloggers write is not lost on people who read these blogs.  They relate to the way bloggers express themselves. According to BlogHer, 98% of women surveyed said they trust the information that they get from blogs.

• A shift from advertising to social marketing: Advertising dollars are shifting to campaigns that leverage blogs and social media networks such as Facebook and Pinterest.  This means more money for people who write blogs on topics of importance to brands.
• Content marketing: Content that is developed by people with sway - influencers as they are often called.
• More sophisticated social marketing tools that are being used by public relations companies and marketers. How much bloggers get paid is determined by the return on investment they provide.

Influencer marketing is a hot trend. Services like Klout, Traacker and SocMetrics are examples of companies that have emerged in the space.

I am a bit skeptical of influencer marketing.  It is a form of pay-to-play, which has been on the rise. It leads to questions about the  independence of the blogger. Are they writing for their community or the brand?

Bloggers can get paid very well. BlogFrog says it has paid out about $500,000 to bloggers this year. That’s a lot of money. And the purse will only increase over time as advertising budgets go increasingly to social campaigns.

BlogFrog will be extending its reach into other markets such as tech and gaming. It just formed a major partnership with Meredith Publishing which selected BlogFrog as its influencer marketing platform of choice.

The stakes are only going to get higher. But we need to be careful not to lose sight of why bloggers have become so important. It’s their independence that matters. If we forget that, bloggers will be viewed nothing more than shills for big corporations.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

PeerIndex, the Klout-like influencer ranking startup which this year picked up a $3 Million Series A round, is beefing up its team and scaling up operations. Specifically, it’s hired Garth Holsinger, Klout’s ex-VP of Sales and Business Development, to help accelerate their marketing and partnerships. This makes for a significant move, especially since they’ve lured him away from the very agency he set up after he left Klout.

They’re also bringing on David Galbraith (former co-founder of Moreover and co-founder of Yelp) and Rikk Carey (ex-Napster and co-founder of Plaxo) as advisers. These are pretty heavyweight names. And tonight they also go live with a campaign with on-demand limo service Uber. Busy busy.

Garth told us he left Klout 5/6 months ago to start his own agency in NYC focused on influencer marketing. However he joined PeerINdex because he “realised the analytics were rick solid, and climate in UK is ripe for this,” he told us by phone tonight. “Agencies are pouncing on Influencer Marketing and major brands are now ready to act. There is a huge amount of enthusiasm.”

Founder and CEO Azeem Azhar says that while Klout concentrates on the US, PeerIndex plans to scale outside and win the ROW market (Rest Of World). The startup is now running influencer campaigns in multiple languages in the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Germany and India.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I like Joe Fernandez a lot, more than I like most people. He’s a true entrepreneur and badass, asking specifically to be onstage with me at LeWeb London because he knew that I had serious misgivings about his product, Klout. He told me he wanted a challenge and to put himself outside his comfort zone, both before and after the interview. Cool, anyone who’s not scared of being in the hot seat garners my immediate esteem.

So what was the result of a conversation between two people who respect the (red) pants off of each other? “The hardest grilling I’ve seen at a LeWeb conference in over five years,” wrote one audience member. Apparently the talk was so painful it led to countless critical tweets, multiple synopsis posts with titles like “Klout CEO gets sauteed in London,” “Klout clouted at Le Web” and allegations that  I “broiled” Fernandez out of some sort of personal vendetta. Both Joe and I were dumbfounded at the reaction afterwards.

You know, I am sort of notoriously awful at interviews, because I continuously interview out of my league, as in volunteer for the hardest, most public jobs even though I have insufferable social anxiety (two years ago I had never done an interview onstage, yet I somehow convinced Loic Le Meur to let me do LeWeb Paris and yes, bombed hard).

I’ve also realized this weird dichotomy about being a female interviewer after doing a bunch of these things: If you smile and are nice people think you’re being flirty. If you are serious and ask pointed questions, people think you’re being a bitch. You can’t win.

But, though a lot of audience feedback about this specific interview leaned towards the latter option, Joe and I actually had a lot of fun onstage and I for one learned a lot and thought he was authentic and sincere. ”The story of Klout is me and the team not being smart enough to realize how challenging what we’re doing is and charging straight ahead into this crazy ambition,” Joe explained. Sound familiar?

You can’t say October 26th [The Kloutocalypse] in our office without people flinching,” he went on, “[But] it bonded everyone much tighter. It fuels us to work harder and build better things. We love the challenge and the naysayers.”  Inspiring words, from someone whose concept of a world where text-based social communication is rewarded stemmed from the harsh reality of having his jaw wired shut for three months. So no, I’m not the “sexy bar gurl [sic] disinterested in nerdy guy,” I’m a fellow traveler who wants to help someone else with an ambitious vision execute as efficiently as possible.

Do you guys think I was too harsh on Joe here? Be as honest as possible in the comments, and don’t worry about offending me; This job makes your skin so thick it’s more like a peel.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch