Klout might be worth watching after all

So far I couldn’t care less about Klout. I thought it was a silly game, at best a tool invented for Social Media Consultants. But last week I listened to This Week in Venture Capital with guest John Frankel, an early investor, and he said some interesting things I didn’t know.

• You can curate your own “this is me in the social web”-page, SEO-friendly obviously, curated by you. Basically your aggregated output but managed. If you don’t want your cooking pictures or cat pictures as part of what defines you, you can take them off of that page.
• The API actually provides the Klout score not only as overall score but per category. I didn’t know this and I think it helps much more if you can trust to find an influencer in wine or movies or music than go just for people that generally have a high Klout score.
• There is a quite practical advantage in having a Klout score as it is yet another way to discern if an email sender address is spam or real. Gmail (rapportive) or Bing offer or will offer to display Klout score next to the email address. Many emails in your spamfolder will have a score of zero but if you see one with a score of 50 you might want to look twice.

Coupled with Frankel’s comment that the vision of the company is much bigger, that they are in the 1st inning of their game, the points above lead me to at least have a look at the product every once in a while. Maybe Klout solves a problem after all.