Empire Avenue: Where ‘buying your friends’ is a good thing

I’ve just received an invite to a service that’s currently in beta, Empire Avenue. To explain what the service is, I first need to explain ‘influence’. As you do things online, on social networks and blogs, you affect a graph of influence. For example, I post online that I liked a restaurant in Perth. My friends/followers hear that and some of them may be influenced to go there. In addition, they may pass that influence on to some of their friends/followers. That’s free advertising for the restaurant purely from my influence. The more people that you can reach / convince, the larger your influence is (p.s. That’s the super simple explanation, there’s more to it than that but beyond the needs of this post). This works for places, movies, music, events, software, and pretty much anything that people think about recommendations before they choose to try.

Empire Avenue is an online virtual ’stock exchange’, where the companies are people/websites and their value is determined by their online social influence. You can buy and sell shares in your friends or other people or even brands / websites. When you start off, you have an initial influence value, and a small amount of money to buy shares with. To increase your value, the system needs to know how influential you are.

To get that information, you add services to it:

• Your website
• Your blog: This is interesting. To prevent people using someone else’s blog and to reduce spam, there are 2 systems in place. Once you add your blog, you have to verify it by editing a post and adding a small code to it. The system finds the code and knows you are an author. Once that’s done, the blog has to be recommended by 5 people, who are willing to vouch for it and have their profiles linked as a person who vouches for that blog. This aims to make sure the content is actually influential.
• Your twitter account
• Your facebook account: You can give the system access to your profile as an app. I can see the privacy-conscious quietly whispering “omg” at their keyboards. Worry not! Not too much anyway. They won’t put any of that content out in public. The only people on Empire Ave that will see some of your content are your friends on facebook (who are also on Empire Ave), who have access to it anyway. It basically checks how often people like or comment on your content to increase your Influence value. It’s not compulsory, so for those with strong feelings about privacy, feel free to leave this out.

If you want to try it out, it’s in invite only beta. I have a few invites that I’ll be giving out to readers. All you need to do is follow me on twitter, @ritwikr (twitter.com/ritwikr).

Once that’s done, tweet this: I want an invite from Ritwik’s blog to Empire Ave: Buying and Selling shares of your friends online (http://bit.ly/bufUAr).

I’ll give invites to the first people to post that, and continue as I get more invites.