In the June 26th edition of The New York Times, I came across an article entitled “Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored.”

Uh-oh – what does that mean? The reporter imagines a world where “we are all assigned a number that indicates how influential we are. This number would help determine whether you receive a job, a hotel-room upgrade or free samples at the supermarket.”

But it’s no fantasy: Companies with names like Klout, Twitter Grader and PeerIndex are scoring people based on their social influence. Users with accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are already being graded. According to Klout, “The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.”

How you get scored isn’t just based on the number of friends or connections you have, but how influential you are within your social network. The New York Times reports that more than 2,500 companies have signed up to use Klout’s data. Marketers are giving away promotional offers to key influencers in the hopes that they make recommendations to their networks.

Enthusiasts of the new social score believe that it’s the new consumer equalizer: Klout executives say, “For the first time, it’s not just how much money you have or what you look like. It’s what you say and how you say it.”

Critics believe that we could be creating a consumer “social media caste system.” I argue that we should eye the social score with caution – think about how credit scores have become prevalent in any large transactional purchase you make, and how other institutions use credit score as a predictive input for decision-making (insurance companies use credit scores as a predictor of risk, for example).

Now what if it turns out that your social score ends up being a highly predictive input into whether a bank should lend you money or if an insurance company should issue you a policy? Credit scores are even used to discriminate against prospective employees (click here for a recent article from TIME magazine on the topic). So the question isn’t if, but when are social scores going to make their way into other decision models and what will that mean to consumers?

This is going to be a fascinating topic to keep an eye on.