Comments on: What’s wrong with User Ranking so far? Relevancy !

By: philgo20

philgo20 — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:17:51 +0000

Following this post, I was contacted by Joe Fernandez, CEO of Klout to tell me more about their platform. What I learnt is that the topic search was just recently launched and that they are monitoring it closely to make it as relevant as possible. I also learn that they do "some" semantic analysis of the link shared by Twitter, so the profile of the users and their influence domain is defined by more than just the tweets themselves.

To be fair and to compare apples to apples, to actually build a list of influencers for the Django framework, I would need to to a couple more detailled search like : "django python", "django programming", "django blog development" and so on.

Right now, there doesn't seem to be enough data yet to search for that in Klout Topic search. You will also need full boolean search to get the right level of precision at some point.

Joe seems like a genuinely nice guy working on a missing piece of the conversation puzzle with a small team in SF.

Here's some part of our exchange.

What is your roadmap plan on gathering profile information from other network than Twitter ?
JF: We are planning to release Facebook and LinkedIn data early next year.

Do you check all links shared by registered users ? What do you check in links ? Keyword density ?
JF: Depending on our processing load and the overall activity on twitter we are able to process varying % of links. Generally we get most of them and we are working to get them all. When we process the links we are performing semantic analysis where keyword density is one of the factors.

Does the topic search allows boolean expression ?
JF: Right now, no. Would like to add this down the road.

By: philgo20

philgo20 — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:17:51 +0000

By: jfbelisle

jfbelisle — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:18:26 +0000

Quite interesting, we're talking about real impact

By: philgo20

philgo20 — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:30:44 +0000

totally. What's good is that they contacted me and we shall chat on Friday, so I might have something to add here soon.

By: philgo20

philgo20 — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:29:03 +0000

@missrogue : funny isn't it, I haven't been able to find the mention myself… but it's getting harder to search older tweets without the API.

By: jfbelisle

jfbelisle — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:16:33 +0000

You are so right Phil, thanks for sharing. What is also interesting here is that Klout seems to have changed their algorithm in the last few months. The “popularity vs. relevance” debate is an important one. Popularity is killing creativity, uniqueness and in some points expertise, while relevance is doing just the opposite.

By: missrogue

missrogue — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:03:12 +0000

That's so odd. I don't think I've even mentioned Django before (maybe Django Reinhardt!). Totally broken!