Perhaps I can try to convince you of our long term vision: developers increasingly take their work online, which results in a mountain of professional data. A lot of it is meaningless, but some of it can be woven into interesting stories.
We're still trying to find the best approach to this, but in essence, our mission is making sense of this data. Some of this will have nothing to do with popularity - say, we might give you a concise overview of someone's code or professional thoughts. Other metrics will use social activity only as a rough validation. For example, if someone has 20 watchers on GitHub, they're definitely not a celebrity, but they have crossed a very meaningful threshold of "someone cares about this person's work".
Sometimes developers don't have a choice about putting their work online--many large companies actively discourage (or prohibit) their engineers from participating in any meaningful way in open source projects.
Want to post your personal hacking online under your real name? Nope, sorry--"everything you do belongs to the company, and we can't take the chance that you might accidentally post some uber-valuable trade secret." So rather than risk losing the job, you just find some other, not-publicly-visible way to spend your time.
Maybe this group of developers isn't viewed as interesting to many employers, and if that's the case my argument isn't worth much.
We know, and that sucks. Let me ask you a question though - developers who can't put their code online, will some of them not engage online otherwise? Say, consume professional content on twitter, post on HN, or answer questions on Stack Overflow?
Our goal is to look at any kind of professional activity online, not only code. What do you think?
I'm not inclined to do any of those things in a serious way, much less in a way that I'd call professional. I post on HN sporadically and solely for my own amusement, and I don't know that any employers would find my history here relevant in any way.
I don't really get into the social media aspect of development even when I'm allowed to contribute to open projects, so I doubt I'd be very visible (or very attractive if I were) via any social media outlets. Whether I'm the norm or not, I don't know.
Edited to add: By the way, I do appreciate that somebody's out there trying to help developers be more easily visible for doing such things, so don't take my comments the wrong way. :)
I think the problem I have is that it is not the case that "developers" are taking their work on line. It is the case that "some developers" are taking their work online.
If all you care about is that subset of developers, I'm sure your approach is fine.
I get you. A lot of developers don't take their work online at all. But there are probably a hundred thousands developers who do take at least some parts of their work online.
Perhaps speaking more practically, the market for developers is segmented. Not all companies want to hire all developers, and some companies specifically look for developers who do take their work online. It's those companies we want to help right now.
Take us for example. We just hired Yuval Adam (http://y3xz.com/) for a project, and his online activity had a huge part in raising our interest.
Check out his site. It's essentially a collection of links to professionally relevant online content. Sure, these are no guarantees. If you were hiring a developer though, wouldn't your interest be raised?
We're still trying to find the best approach to this, but in essence, our mission is making sense of this data. Some of this will have nothing to do with popularity - say, we might give you a concise overview of someone's code or professional thoughts. Other metrics will use social activity only as a rough validation. For example, if someone has 20 watchers on GitHub, they're definitely not a celebrity, but they have crossed a very meaningful threshold of "someone cares about this person's work".
Does that sound like a good direction to you?