Farewell to Klout
With this message Klout said goodbye to its followers and enthusiasts: “after careful consideration we have decided to shut down the Klout website & the Klout Score. This will happen on May 25, 2018. It has been a pleasure serving you and thank you for your ongoing support over the years.” Reactions followed immediately.
On May 25, after long time in oblivion, Klout will die. The platform erected as a monitor of the reputation of users in social networks, as a measure of their supposed influence, says goodbye definitely. The popularity it achieved, especially between 2010 and 2012, is thing of the past. There will be few who are surprised to know that at this point Klout was still working at full capacity, as it did in the past. When the Klout Score or expert titles on certain subjects that the platform gave were for many a symbol of distinction. Its life, however, ends.
Lithium Technologies, the company that acquired the service for 200 million dollars, has announced in the last hours that they have taken the decision to cancel it. As of May 25, as we said, Klout will cease to exist. The executive director of Lithium Technologies, Pete Hess, has been in charge of communicating it by means of an email written in the first person. "The acquisition of Klout provided Lithium with valuable artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, but Klout as an independent service is not aligned with our long-term strategy," he says.
The date chosen, on May 25, also coincides with the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation and it does not seem to be a coincidence. A spokesman for the company told TechCrunch that "the next deadline for the implementation of GDPR simply accelerated our plans to end Klout." It has not been the main reason, but it has been decisive to fix the death of the service. Despite everything, it is possible that the spirit of Klout returns. The head of Lithium Technologies has also said in his email that while working on different projects, "we are planning to launch a new social impact scoring methodology based on Twitter." We will see what that comment ends in and if we will have a Klout 2.0.”
The reactions on Twitter did not take that long. While some seem to miss it: “#Klout is certainly not perfect but find it fairly consistent & the score often a decent indication of impact - Certainly one of the indicators I used to judge a new follower-account. Will miss the service. “and “too bad for all the Rankings that used the Klout Influencer Score!”, others seem hilarious: “But how else will the world know that I am now an expert in “Internet?”, “Klout does not lie. Klout does not lie. Klout does not lie. . . If I tell myself enough will it be true?”. It seems it is better for users not to get used to certain tools like Klout. When the monsters surround, they end up leaving fans behind.