Once every few days or so a Tweet pops up in the mentions column that
informs me that someone has assigned me +K on Klout.

What?

Apparently Klout is a service that, and I quote:

provides social media analytics that measures a user’s influence across
their social network. The analysis is done on data collected from sites such
as Twitter and Facebook and measures the size of a person’s network, the
content created, and how other people interact with that content.

Hey, great, just what we needed, another third party service that provides
meta-analysis of where someone ranks in the hierarchy of social media.
Thats pretty exciting.

Oh, wait, its not. Not at all.

The fact is, just being a social media network is a tough row to hoe. How
many can you name that have come and gone, failing to receive any real
traction compared to the giants?

Its even harder to be a derivative service, trying to attach yourself to
the mainstream and provide a raison d’être for social media users to adopt
your service and do something with you.

There a dusty corner of the bookmarks tab on my browser thats like the
elephants graveyard: its where social media ranking systems come to die.
Plenty of other services have attempted to create relevance for themselves
by telling users how relevant they are, only to fall by the wayside, so
irrelevant I cant even be bothered to delete them from my bookmarks.

A brief, non-inclusive list:

Technorati
Blogburst
MyBlogLog

There might be more, but I couldnt be bothered to look for them.

The bottom line here is what do ranking services deliver that users cant
live without? Should you be concerned with ensuring that you maximize the
amount of Klout you have?

I say not.

Ranking services, and most aspiring social media networks, for that matter,
are like shiny new toys: they get played with for a while, and then end up
forgotten in a corner.

Six months from now will anyone still kare?