TNW Quick Hit
PeerIndex takes your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn information, then decides how much of an expert you are in various fields.
Love It: Cleaner than others we’ve seen. Better explanation.
Hate It: No algorithm has yet figured out how to factor in human behavior.
The Details
We’ve seen a few of these sorts of “social importance” sites springing up lately. Combine that with pushes from sites such as FastCompany to figure out influence and we’re sitting on top of some pretty interesting information.
PeerIndex seems, however, to clear things up a bit. It will look at 3 categories, then give you an overall PeerIndex score on a 1-100 scale:
Based upon the topics of your status updates/tweets/etc, PeerIndex will assign you as an “expert” in various categories. Apparently I’m an expert in Social Media, Google, Apple and the Tech Industry. Pretty surprising, when you consider that I really don’t know much about Apple or claim to know very much about social media.
Therein lies the problem with PeerIndex and others of its ilk. The authority that these sites try to measure is based on singular comments and not works as a whole. Further, let’s say that I only had an audience of 1, but that 1 had an audience of 100. If they take my idea and run with it, how influential am I in that instance?
Is It Useful?
Honestly? Yes. But probably not for the reasons that it wants to be. Sites that attempt to name people as experts often fall very short. But if you want to find a place where you can search out others on Twitter and the like that have similar interests, PeerIndex is a great stopping point.
The other thing that PeerIndex does that impresses me is that it goes out onto a limb. It gives you a clearly-labeled contact button, right on the front page, that tells you to get in touch if you disagree with your rating.
While I think that the idea of social influence measurement still has a long way to go, PeerIndex still holds some valuable information. It’s certainly worth a look if you want to gather some insight into your own behavior.
i just looked at their topics…. i don’t think i post about any of those… i’m doooooomed to a low index because i talk about social issues and not tech/business stuff… well… and mostly personal junk that nobody really cares about…. ah well… this is just an amusement for me… and not really important…
Hey Brad – I gotta agree with you – its interesting what some companies/folks value as important.
Our topic model will expand rapidly over the next few weeks. Don’t worry. There are also a set of hidden topics that form part of the benchmark model we use to evaluate an overall score and these do cover social issues.