Influence measurement startup Klout unveiled a major new feature today, so big they call it The New Klout. It’s the new home page; they’re all in.

What does it do? It suggests hot links related to your interests so you can easily find things to share online. When you share good stuff, you build social capital. Klout being one measure of that. (Disclosure: I am the CEO of Little Bird, which is much, much cooler than Klout. I use Klout too, though.)

I like the idea behind The New Klout; in fact we do something similar at Little Bird. But at first glance there are three big shortcomings I see in The New Klout. We’ll see how long these last for, they’re smart people and I can imagine the feature will improve dramatically over the coming months. I bet the new site will become mobile soon responsive too.

All critique of Klout aside (it’s based on keywords, it can be gamed, it’s about nothing but the size of your megaphone, it puts a hard number on soft human interaction, etc – or at least all critique in parentheses) the New Klout is pretty cool.

Here are three things it doesn’t do, though.

1. You can’t really pick your own topics – you have to select from a list of pre-created topics.
   

   Sure, you can type keywords into the search box, but lots of topics just don’t show up. I ran a report for someone tonight on Little Bird to discover the most peer-validated experts on ITC4D (Information Technology for Development) in Africa, then track the hottest content among them. You can’t do that in the new Klout – but you can’t subscribe to content for ICT4D, or for Oil and Gas, HCM, talent management or quantified self for example. I guess it’s aimed for B2C markets.

2. It only finds content to share, not influential people to engage with. You can barf out great links all day, but if you’re not engaging in conversations with other influential, reputable, relevant people on social networks, you may as well be one of those social media consultants who buys hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. If a bear shares a great link in the woods and nobody’s there to hear it, does…?
3. The sources seem pretty mainstream. A lot of links from Forbes, TechCrunch, the top sites that everybody knows. One thing that’s super cool? The Hidden Gems feature. I don’t know how Klout determines that my audience (I don’t like to call people that, that’s their word) hasn’t likely seen a link, but it’s a cool idea. That’s cool thing number 1.

• Cool thing #2 is the ability to train the system to show you more or less content like a particular item. It’s unclear whether that means show me less from this topic, source, keywords, or what – but trainable things are good! I would like to do more of that.
• Scheduling the sharing of content is cool. Look out, Buffer. Buffer has been experimenting with recommended content to share too, I saw people say on the twitter. We’ve got support for Buffer publishing in Little Bird as well. Scheduling means you can jump in to whatever system you’re using, find great content, put it in a scheduler and then be publishing insights all day long.

That’s my take on The New Klout for Content Marketing. I wish our charming and much larger rivals the best of luck with it. I hope they move the whole industry forward. And now I’ll put my head back down and get back to work on building our own technology for capturing value from the world’s most influential people online. (Hint: we believe it’s not about getting free stuff and new followers – it’s about learning new things and discovering new business opportunities.)

Here’s how we do it, right now.

The Overview page of our whole report on this topic: