(Photo: Gregor Richardson, ODT)

When not creating their own forum on Reddit where they can break their parents' rules and listen to their music as loud as they want, teens have resorted to inconveniencing everyone around them because of their addiction to smartphones. The future, ladies and gents.

The Otago Daily Times reports that 13-year-old Spencer Sutherland Todd was attempting to take a photo of the beautiful Mt. Allan scenery in New Zealand when he accidentally dropped his phone onto the tracks. Then, instead of giving in to the fact that his parents would just have to buy him a new one when he returned from his exotic vacation, the teen had a full-on panic attack and pulled the train's emergency brake, bringing the entire locomotive full of passengers to a halt.

"I pulled the emergency thing that you only pull in extreme emergencies," Mr. Todd told the paper, unaware that he will most likely be impersonated in a future SNL sketch that parodies our digital existence. "It is very important to me."

NJ Transit employees, take note: the train's staff actually did a cursory look for the poor teen's precious iPhone, and eventually found it--unharmed!--on the trip back. Mr. Todd was bestowed his beloved gadget amid cheers from fellow passengers, because this is New Zealand, and people are apparently just plain nicer there.

However, a word of caution, dear readers: if you pull the subway emergency brake because you dropped your iPhone on the tracks, New Yorkers would appreciate it if you kindly never rode the subway again. Thank you and good day.

Today, Klout released a new scoring model, and the impact on some loyal users was dramatic:

Timothy Whalin 1 hour ago

Very unhappy with this change. My score went from 73 down to 53. 20 point drop. I've been working for months to increase my Klout score. Please fix this.

Kalani Kirk Hausman 49 minutes agoin reply to @MimiBakerMN

Same here - went from 58 t0 40 and lost all my TOPICS. The problem is that major changes invalidate existing articles and references using the Klout score. This trashed a 6-month effort to get our organization to use Klout as a measure of social media marketing effectiveness. Back to square one, but this time I'll have to use PeerIndex or something else more stable.

Klout system is called PeopleRank, after Google's famed PageRank. Like Google, Klout deals with a ton of data, and has to adjust its algorithms to help combat people who are gaming the system and take account of new services or platforms influencing the social media sphere. As the company put it in the comment thread:

Klout 58 minutes agoin reply to Ruxtbl

Hey Ruxtbl, You can think of this change similar to how Google changes it's PageRank to always ensure the highest level of accuracy. Their goal is to find the most valuable content for your search, and our goal is to accurately measure influence. If your goal is becoming more influential and not gaming the Score, you'll do just fine.

Klout's success had made its score an authoritative figure in social media marketing circles. But the sudden change in users scores has soured many on Klout as a stable metric for employment.

• Richard Mackney 1 hour ago

  I can handle a score change but you should then also update the history statistics as anyone viewing my graphs see a massive plummet with no explanation why it's gone down hill so fast. If I was searching for a job in Social Media right now I'd be concerned.

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• melissary 56 minutes ago in reply to Richard Mackney

  As someone who is searching for a job in SM, I AM concerned.

  4 people liked this. Like Reply

• Kalani Kirk Hausman 47 minutes ago in reply to melissary

  Same here - and the change shot things to heck and back.

  2 people liked this. Like Reply

• Dolf Muccillo 1 hour ago

  I feel bad for people in Social Media / Branding who rely on their Klout score (to some extent) for their livelihoods! I'm sure most of them saw big drops.

Another interesting note, Klout seems to have applied this new score retroactively. Today it's 57.50, and the graph on Klout informs us we haven't been above 60 anytime in the last month.

We grabbed a snapshot yesterday for our story, when our score was 64.