Klout is one of those services that’s important to those invested in the social media industry. It’s a service that rates your social media performance across a number of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc and gives you a rating. As Klout points out, it’s main focus is giving this information to businesses to offer rewards to customers who are actively sharing their products across these social services.
More and more businesses are asking for Klout’s information and they have answered the call. The company is pushing a big upgrade to its API. It’s about time as well since the service is now pulling about 1 billion API calls a day. A graph provided by Klout shows the service was only pulling about 7.7 million API calls back in July of 2010. Last month, the service pulled almost 30 billion API calls. That’s a massive jump and they need a new API to handle all of those requests.
The Klout API is officially moving up to version 2 to huge influx of call requests. The company has also increased its number of partners using its information to 6,000 from just 2,000 a year ago. The Klout for iPhone app has been using the new API, but now it’s available to developers to use.
The new version of the Klout API features the following upgrades:
Instead of being Twitter-focused, it’s now “Klout-focused;” we offer a service that translates identifiers from Twitter to Klout IDs to facilitate speed and to incorporate influence from other networks in the future.
The new API is faster, asynchronous and has a new caching system.
Because it’s based on our internal architecture, we’ll soon release new features to the API.
All of the new features are enabled by Klout using a new “oAuth2-authentication system” for users of the service. Soon people will be able to +K Tweets, tumblr posts, what have you to increase the Klout of that person.
If you want to get in on the Klout API v2 party, you can sign up for a key now on the developer’s page. While you’re waiting, you can get a head start by reading the documentation.
[h/t: TechCrunch]