Mei Ying

What is Empire Avenue?

Empire Avenue (EAv) is the Social Media Exchange. It allows you to buy each others’ shares, earn virtual dividends, and earn virtual currencies by being active in your social networks.

It is definitely more fun than the other stock exchange games because you can buy the shares of people you actually know (or know of). A person’s share price increases and decreases according to their social network activities. The more active they are, the higher their share price will be.

Social gaming has been on the rise and we have heard plenty of success stories such as Zynga but to actually incorporate social media activities outside of the game into the game, that is just a brilliant move.

This feeds our inner narcissism and like I said before, we ALL have narcissistic instincts in us. I feel a sense of satisfaction when a stranger buys my shares. It shows that they believe my value will rise. I’m actually valuable! *Score!* (If you tell me you don’t feel the same way, you’re just lying to yourself)

Empire Avenue has been around since 2009, but only began to pick up momentum recently after influencers like Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and the likes started actively participating in the platform. Several brands such as Ford and AT&T have also decided that Empire Avenue is worth their investment.

Chris Pirillo, an online personality will tell you in more details why you should take a dip in the Empire Avenue ocean in this video. His share price is also going up, so you better invest in him quick! (I bought some of his shares when he was priced at 70+ Eaves, now he’s reaching 140 Eaves!)

Will Empire Avenue give Klout and Peer Index a run for their money? 

I don’t really think so.

True, your share price could indicate your influence level, but because of the nature of the game where you are encouraged to chat and post messages in your communities, players are doing ‘purchase swap’ where ‘if you buy some of my shares, I’ll buy some of yours’. I do not find this a fair indication of a person’s influence level.

Although your activitiy in social networks play a big part in determining your prices, but there are too many loopholes where a person can game the system.

So I should ignore Empire Avenue then

No. Although I don’t think Empire Avenue would be taking over Klout and Peer Index’s role as the influence metric but it does help to give an indication of how influential a person is. When you click on a user’s profile, you will be able to see his share price, as well as the scores of all the social networks he linked to. The value that Empire Avenue has over Klout and Peer Index is that Empire Avenue links to almost all social networks while Klout, for example, only links to Facebook and Twitter.

Should businesses invest time and effort into this? 

Why not? I always believe in experimenting. If you adopt a wait and see stance, then you will be late to the game. And hey, if Ford thinks this is good enough for them, it should be good enough for you.

Sign up for an account now and book your ticker quick cause you wouldn’t want this to happen to your brand.

Self-plug

Remember to invest in me once you’ve signed up! Check out my chart. It’s a steady rise!

And this is what Daniel Cerventus, a local influencer, has to say.

I promise I’ll be a good investment See you at Empire Avenue!

Paul Carr was hilarious throughout the award ceremony. Seriously how he stays alive after all the comments he made on a daily basis baffles me. 

Here are some of the notable winners:

iPad won the best device, Google self-driving cars won best technology achievement, Foursquare won best location based service, DailyBooth won best social app, Twitter won best overall startup, Quora won best new startup and Andrew Mason won CEO of the year. 

Find the list of all winners here and the video highlights here. 

There has been various outcries over privacy issues over at Facebook. Facebook settings seems to be preset with ‘all public unless stated otherwise’ policy and for obvious reasons, the public were not too happy about it. Facebook learned its lessons the hard way over the years, but I guess they will never fully gain the public’s trust again. I personally like to make jokes about Mark Zuckerberg’s policy – Do first, Apologise later. 

Diaspora, widely known as Facebook alternative, is a new social networking site that was backed by Kickstarter. Diaspora aims to solve Facebook’s privacy issue. Diaspora allows you to categorise your contacts into various little sub-groups called ‘Aspects’ so that you can manage your privacy better. I know Facebook allows you to group your Friends too, but Diaspora does it in a more obvious and easy to manage manner.  

Jeff sent me an invite some time ago and I have since invited four other people onto the platform. Unfortunately, at the moment, the number of connections I have is a miserable 6. We can’t see our connections’ friends unless they’re our mutual friends, so at the moment, we’re not really sure how we’re supposed to expand our connections (since we were only given 5 invites).

Whenever I tried to search for friends, I get irrelevant results. I resorted to asking my friend for his username before I managed to locate him. Asking each and everyone of your friends what their userID is will be a tiring and time consuming process. Especially when you are already connected through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. 

Here’s a snapshot of the interface. The one thing that I really love is the minimalism. At the moment, the site is still a bit slow and takes forever to refresh but hey, they’re still in alpha. 

What I do not like about Diaspora is the URL. Instead of Diaspora.com (which is available btw) the URL is www.joindiaspora.com. It took me quite a while before I got used to typing that. 

I just go onboard occassionally to see if any of my 6 contacts post anything new. They never did except Jeff. Will just have to wait a while longer to see how they pan out. 

For anyone who wants my last invite, let me know.