The Inflation of Social Currency

Two trends...firstly, and predictably, the minute there is a new social currency, there will be the attempts to inflate it for commercial gain - Facebook Likes being the latest example - CNN:

Facebook has begun a purge of fake accounts and "Likes" as part of a set of site improvements announced last month. The result has been lower numbers on fan pages, including some of the site's most popular ones, but no actual loss of real followers.

On August 31, Facebook announced plans for improvements to its "site integrity systems." That, according to a blog post, included increased automated efforts to sniff out and delete fake accounts or Likes that had been illicitly sold or gained by otherwise shady means.

"A Like that doesn't come from someone truly interested in connecting with a Page benefits no one ...," the post read. "When a Page and fan connect on Facebook, we want to ensure that connection involves a real person interested in hearing from a specific Page and engaging with that brand's content."

It was ever thus....but the more worrying trend to me is the increasing belief that systems that measure this are in some way measuring something valuable - Klout has just got significant investment from Microsoft and it will be linked to Bing - TechCrunch:

You’ll begin seeing Klout scores — the combined measure of a person’s influence across Twitter, Facebook and other social networks — show up in the search engine today. The initial implementation will show Klout scores for friends in the “People Who Know” section of the right-hand column, alongside other third parties already in there, including Twitter and Quora. Search for a hot topic like “Facebook advertising”, you’ll see people with socially-proven expertise showing up. Mouse over an expert’s name, and their Klout score will appear, along with their Klout-determined areas of expertise.

There seems to be a mass amnesia about the GIGO concept, in that these reputation systems' parameters are half bake...sorry, "currently imperfect", and are measuring an easily inflatable and unstable social currency, based on the actions of a relatively small number of noisy vessels. Still, no doubt there will soon be a Klout Engine Optimisation industry (if there isn't one already).

Hopefully these Index systems will become more discerning over time, but i don't think that's where the payoff is today. To me its just another example of the online forces inexorably driving Greshams Law of Information - ie bad information is increasingly driving out good on the "Free" Web.