Klout, a startup that assigns people a score based on their online influence, has announced a significant update to its four-year-old company, including increased scoring accuracy, more transparency, and a new site design.

High Score

Klout assigns each user an online influence score between one and 100, generated by measuring data from the user’s social networks, including Facebook, Twitter,  Google+, LinkedIn, and Foursquare activity.

The update to the algorithm that generates this score now accounts for 400 different social media signals, which is up from 100 signals previously. Klout now analyses 12 billion total data points, up from 1 million, on a daily basis.

Real World Influence

Klout has also, for the first time, integrated Wikipedia as a primary data source to get at assessing a person’s offline influence. With the addition of Wikipedia data, Klout is taking its first stab at scoring real-world influence, and its new score aims to provide a more accurate assessment of overall influence.

Leader President Barack Obama has already seen a chang to his Klout score based on his real-world influence, rising from 94 to 99 with the addition of the Wikipedia score signal. Conversely, Twitter star Justin Bieber lowered from 100 to 92 based on his lack of worldly clout.

“Although [he] is one of the most influential celebrities on Twitter, his Wikipedia page has lower importance than those of people like Barack Obama. Previously, Justin had the distinction of being the only person with a perfect 100 Klout Score. With this update, his Score drops from 100 to 92,” the Klout blog explains.

“This is a huge engineering accomplishment for us,”  Joe Fernandez, the CEO and co-founder of Klout said of the new scoring technology, “but a new score is not very exciting unless you can understand what it means. To do that, we’ve completely updated the site.”

Influential ‘Moments’

The significance of the reworked score is underscored by an overhaul to the Klout.com site design, rolling out to users on a gradual basis, that includes the addition of a feature called ‘moments.’

Moments, the primary part of a member’s profile page now, identify and showcase the most influential updates a member has posted in the past 90 days. The moments feature calls out the specific status updates that have had the most impact on a person’s Klout score.

“This feature displays the content and ideas that have been most influential across all of your networks, all in one place,” Fernandez explained on the company's blog. “Moments will also help you see interaction patterns emerge that can help you shape your influence and improve the quality of your ideas.”

These updates mark what Fernandez called the next phase of Klout's evolution “into the dynamic, engaging platform of understanding and insight that I envisioned.

“Our ongoing vision is to help everyone discover and be recognised for their influence. Your ideas are more powerful than you can imagine, and with these updates to Klout, we are taking a step towards helping you understand that influence and better create ideas that shape the world around you.”