Startup Blog

Why Michael Arrington from TechCrunch is Wrong About Facebook Grader

Posted by Mike Volpe on 1/20/09 1:34 PM

HubSpot recently launched Facebook Grader, which got the attention of Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.

"To sum up my opinion of this tool, it's beyond useless. Not that I ever planned to, but the last thing I'll ever do now is fill in more of my profile or join more groups."

Here's what Michael is missing.  A major concept in social media is "authority", that is the "power" of a user or person online.  A comment or post online from a user with high authority is something to pay more attention to than a similar post with lower authority.

The number of friends you have and your engagement with a social website is a good way to measure authority.  This is what Facebook Grader is trying to do.  Twitter Grader already does this well - the database contains over 1 million users and I submit that your Twitter Grade is an excellent measure of your authority on Twitter.  Twitter has only 5 million members, but Facebook has over 150 million.  So, the next step is to try to build a measure of authority on Facebook.  Today there is no way to do that. But I think Facebook Grader has a chance to do it... in the future (we have some work to do).

Mike Volpe

Written by Mike Volpe

Mike Volpe is a startup advisor and angel investor based in Boston.

Topics: social media, facebook

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