I am on Twitter, and I kind of like it. Recently, in response to a Wired article on Klout scores, Tom Scott (@tomscott), brilliantly came up with an algorithm that measures the “douchiness” of your Twitter behavior. (For those not familiar with a Klout score, it measures your social influence on the WWW.)
Just type your Twitter into the klouchebag.com, and it kicks out a score between 1 and 100. What is being measured?
Klouchebag uses the ARSE rating system.
Anger: profanity and rage.
Retweets: “please RT”s, no or constant retweeting, and old-style.
Social Apps: every useless checkin on foursquare or its horrible brethren.
English Usage: if you use EXCLAMATION MARKS OMG!!! or no capitals at all, this’ll be quite high.
On Monday, I checked my score:
……………………….And I thought that retweeting was a nice thing to do.
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Alas, it looks like I am one of those people. I am not sure why my ‘social apps’ score is so high. I recently started using Instagram. Maybe that is it.
Is the ARSE system the best set of attributes? Slate does a nice job suggesting other attributes that Tom could include. For example:
Frequency of tweets: This category might need to be scaled depending on the type of Twitter account in question, but, for a personal account, anything over 20 tweets per day warrants some kind of penalty.
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Of course, I wanted to know how I am doing relative to others. Sadly, I am worse than hip hop performer, Chris Brown:
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At least I can take solace in knowing that Piers Morgan is way klouchier than me (and everyone else on Twitter).
What is your Klouchebag score?