But I also think LI endorsements are a joke. People just hit the bulk OK button a few times when they see that box.

While I acknowledge indexing is something we all do offline I think there’s an important reason why we don’t tell those around what we think of them on a scale of 1-10 for various attributes. Even if Reputation systems like Klout could capture all of the context required to make their numbers meaningful the fact is that the only time I rely on references is when I leave my network. A reputation system is only needed between strangers and even then we’re pretty good at forming estimations ourselves based on intuition. (This part of my argument is the weakest).

Re LinkedIn they suffer a big dirty data problem. The endorsements are past tense, decontextual and users intention is undermined by the persistent requests for confirmation every time a profile is viewed.

Trust is scarce right now and I believe these products are a response to that. But computers aren’t so good at emotional intelligence, they are good at persisting data accurately over time, automating repetitive often complex tasks etc.

And then I have to ask: why are my Klout and Kred scores so different? One of them’s lying, they can’t both be right.

Their sales team aren’t getting companies to offer compelling perks here or anywhere. The peerindex guys followed up with me too asking for feedback on the products and a cheeky share. Kred are also trying to get into the space and making some inroads. So yeah, without an update or gimmic to bring us back to inflate visits Klout could be facing problems mid year. Maybe a more pronounced update about claiming searches in Bing (I know) could help a little. But Klout needs a version update, not an incremental release! Is that enough though?

When I first signed up, I kept going back every few days to see what had changed, but never felt the need to spam my Twitter feed with +Ks.

LinkedIn’s endorsement feature is much nicer, with one big exception. I find it hard to trust:

LinkedIn added this nice dialog to the top of the screen after you login asking you if you’d like to endorse your connections for _____ skill. It usually shows them in a grid of 4 connections, and gives a nice button to click to easily give these endorsements.

My own personal experience has been that people will click this button, having no clue whether or not their connection actually has any competency in the skill being endorsed.

So in the end… maybe Klout is better. But can it outlive LinkedIn…?