Klout, the gold standard as far as measuring influence on Twitter, will begin branching out from Twitter by launching the Facebird experiment later today. Facebird will be available the Klout Labs segment of the site. Klout has come a long way since we first covered it back in 2008. The site is much more polished and they’ve added better visual cues and badges to make it easier to understand what your Klout score means. Facebird will add another dimension to the service by letting you find influential Twitter users to connect to based on your Facebook interests.
Facebird works by using Facebook Connect to access your Likes. Using the information about all the stuff you’ve expressed an interest in, Klout pulls up relevant influential Twitter users for you to browse through. It’s not just that simple, though. Klout defines 16 separate classes of users that describe their style of influence based on how they use Twitter. This goes a step further in helping you find the right people to follow. For example, you may not be looking for an expert on your favorite band or someone who talks about your favorite show, but you want to follow someone who just shares a lot of content related to something you like. In essence, you can find people who share your interests and also use Twitter the way you would like them to.
This is definitely a step in a new direction for Klout that could make the service much more useful across the board. Klout could put themselves in a position to build your social graph for you across all of your social media services based on all the things your actually interested in. This could make our lives much simpler and help cut out a lot of the noise we’re used to seeing. Most new services that you join offer the ability to connect with your friends from other services, but this isn’t always the best strategy. Your interests will mostly stay the same across the board, but that doesn’t mean you always want to connect with the same people.