Is Klout losing clout?

I follow Adria Richards' excellent blog about women and technology.  She recently wrote about Klout scores and the way the company has changed in a way that helped me to understand the issues surrounding it better.  Read her post here.  I took stock of my Klout opinion and decided to follow-up with a few of my own thoughts about it.

When Klout first started, I was hesitant.  I'm still hesitant about joining more social networks because I can barely keep up with the ones I have.  I saw lots of people handing out K's and nothing about it really struck me as valuable for the time/effort put into it.  In fact, I laughed about this meme when it came out because I thought it hit the nail on the sarcastic head:



Then, over a Hanukkah dinner at a Jewish Soul Food Pop-up restaurant, I met a guy who worked for Klout.  I asked him some tough questions and came out of the conversation wondering if I had made my judgment too quickly.  So I went home and signed up.

In the first 30 seconds of being signed up, I was sorely disappointed.  A measly score of 32! I consider myself fairly active in the social media world compared to most people and I was barely showing up on the radar. Then I found out that I was above average, most people are in the 20s.  On a scale of 0-100, that wasn't so intuitive and was even distressing at first.

The second alarm or red flag I saw were my influential topics.  Mine were Nordstroms, Sarah Palin and my company.  Interestingly enough, I don't remember ever mentioning these things in my social network.  I write about cats once or twice a week.  I write about San Francisco, moving, and adjusting to small spaces.  What algorithm didn't pick up on these things?  Especially cats! If I've turned into a crazy cat lady, I at least want credit for it.

The last little bit of hope for making me a Klout convert were the perks.  I qualified for only one perk, $25 for ScoreBig.com.  I've never heard of the company, couldn't figure out at first what they sell, once I figured it out there was nothing I wanted, not to mention the $25 didn't even cover one ticket.  Boo on them and boo on Klout for calling it a perk.  For me, it was just a waste of 15 minutes I could have spent looking at cute cat videos on Youtube.

The bottom line for me is that I still don't "get Klout." I love the statisistics side, but I think I can get those stats other ways. The way it's run now is more of a connection between marketers and bloggers - and I've tried several versions of that to no avail.

Am I off base? Are you happy with Klout or avoiding it?