Facebook Grader Throwdown?

For those of you familiar with Twitter Grader and Website Grader, Hubspot has launched the Facebook Grader to give you one more measure of your social authority/vanity. The tool is fairly simple, taking the number of friends you have, the power of your friends’ networks, the completeness of your profile and some other stuff to give you a score out of 100 (I’m a 59). The interesting thing to me though was Michael Arrington’s review on TechCrunch and Mike Volpe’s rebuttal on his blog.

The First Shot

I originally came across Facebook Grader when I checked TechCrunch this morning and saw Michael Arrington’s review. The title indicated the overall tone the review would have (“Facebook Grader For The Sad, Sad People Out There”) and he definitely didn’t disappoint as he summed up the whole shebang by saying “it’s beyond useless.” As you can imagine, Hubspot just might have taken exception.

The Rebuttal

When you’re the VP of Marketing and get a bad review on a major tech blog with, oh, about 1.7 million RSS subscribers, I guess you are required to speak up. And so Mike Volpe got the job. Mike posted his rebuttal on his personal blog and pointed out that the tool is really intended to measure the “authority” and “power” of a user. He makes an excellent point that certain users’ opinions carry more weight, though I don’t know if this tool’s algo captures it correctly.

Let the Rumble Begin

So who are you going to believe? Do you value the opinion of Michael Arrington more than Mike Volpe (TechCrunch is obviously bigger than Hubspot)? If you got a low grade (like my failing effort) would it impel you to improve your profile? Judge for yourself, but as for Michael vs. Mike, let’s get it on!