PinClout measures your influence on Pinterest

Pinterest power players

AGBeat has led the conversation surrounding visual bookmarking site, Pinterest.com by showing you months ago how to use the site, then demonstrated how it can be used in business and have even shared tips on adding Pinterest to your Facebook Page. The bandwagon is big and not only is traffic to the site exploding, interest in the site is as well.

We waited for Klout to integrate Pinterest into their offering, but they have not, so to fill the void in the era of social proof is PinClout which offers users to discover their PinClout.

There has been little to no notice of the site’s launch, so not much is known about the site, but we gather that the scores are based on eight factors – total pins, total repins, total boards, total likes, total comments, total followers and total following, and a quick look at the scores on their landing page, they are all quite low which could possibly be because most users are so new to what is still an invite-only network. The company tweeted, “We will be much more than just a score, planning to roll out powerful trend data and analytics soon.”

The site seems to be operating in stealth with no “About” page or completed profile on any of the entrepreneur websites. With a little digging, we discovered the co-founders are tech entrepreneurs Daniel Schimpfoessl (founder of Purefield) and Chris Fay (founder of the recently sold AdRavage.com, as well as Fashionify.com), both hailing from Kansas.

We do beg our readers, however, not to pin for the sake of altering their score (although we know some will). The site will easily catch a lot of grief for measuring influence on Pinterest as Klout has, but there is a large segment of the digital population that values scoring systems, no matter how arbitrary or flawed, so the new startup is well timed. It will be interesting to watch how they grow and if they are acquired by a company like Klout or Pinterest itself, or if they boom just as Pinterest has.

Below is what a score card looks like:

Related reading materials that have inspired many a webinar, blog post, tweet and yes, pin board:

1. Anatomy of Pinterest and ideas for using the site for business
2. How to earn influence on Pinterest
3. Tip: how to pin photos from Facebook
4. 30 improvements Pinterest should make
5. 12 more tweaks Pinterest should make
6. Hack your way into a Pinterest tab for your Facebook Page
7. Pinterest now drives as much web traffic as Twitter
8. Pinterest traffic skyrockets
9. Pinterest sneaks in a much needed makeover
10. Pinterest imposes character limits on captions
11. Pinterest covertly swaps out your links for affiliate links
12. Anatomy of Pinterest’s poor communication and hatred of men
13. UK proves Pinterest can attract men and wealthy users
14. How Pinterest reminds us that the web is for adults
15. Pinterest is addressing copyright issues head on
16. Pinterest versus their alternative, 20Blinks