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.

Share prices based on influence

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.

A fundamental part of this change is that it’s supposed to be much easier for developers to work with the facebook platform, so I thought I’d put that to the test and add a like button to this blog (It should be visible on that left column). Hit the read link for details of this endeavour.

To get the iframe code for the like button see the plugin page on Facebook’s developer site. There, you can use the widget creator at the bottom to generate the code you need for a given style (there’s a few customizable options). Once you have that, you can add it to your single.php and index.php in the place you want it to appear. The problem with that code is that it refers to the developer site, which gives you a false count, like this:

The likes count is wrong

The count being wrong isn’t the worst of your problems. When it’s set up like this, any viewer clicking that ‘like’ is actually liking the developer page. You’re losing likes from your readers!

This happens because the URL that is referred to here:

… like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.facebook.com%2F& …

is pointing to the developer site. Facebook uses the link to check how many likes that page has. To have a count of how many likes -your- page has, you need it’s permalink. This article details how to do it, but in short, you need to use php to add in the URL of that post to the href parameter. This can be done like this:

… like.php?href=<?php echo rawurlencode(the_permalink()); ?>&amp; …

Now the URL will be the URL for that permalink. Some other CMS’s may have the URL of the current page as a get_permalink function. So this should be easy to convert to whatever you’re using.

The one thing I haven’t been able to do, is have the count to the left of the button, which would fit better (stylistically) on some themes. Hopefully a way to do that will become available (or become apparent to me, if it is already available). Want to try the feature? Like this article :)

Some of us who have both Facebook and Twitter accounts have a setup where anything they tweet becomes their Facebook status. Recently I found an interesting app called Selective Twitter status that only takes tweets that are tagged with #fb and sets those as your Facebook status (after removing the #fb tag). This reduces the noise you generate on Facebook when you say/retweet/reply to something on Twitter which your friends on Facebook have no clue about. Twitter, after all, is used for more than just status messages. Having all your tweets as Facebook statuses means your Facebook friends only see one side of the conversation. This app helps solve that by allowing you to select tweets for Facebook and improve your signal-to-noise ratio. It would be great if the service had an option for removing all #tags from the status since they don’t usually mean much to a Facebook user.

The Twitter app on Facebook also recently started adding a “Follow @username” link under statuses from Twitter, which is a good step in integrating the two services.

What I would really like now is to have a way to link Twitter mentions to Facebook status tags. For example, say I have a friend “@alice” on Twitter, who is also “Alice inWon” on Facebook. If I mention her in a tweet which gets to Facebook, she’s still @alice, which means nothing on Facebook. What would be useful, and semantically better, is if the Twitter app could recognise people who are on both Twitter and Facebook, and convert the mentions into status tags as it gets pulled into Facebook.

For example:

Twitter status with Alice mentioned

Could become:

Facebook status with the person tagged

This would improve the integration between the two services by providing the same information, and linking the mentioned person in the relevant service.

I don’t know if this is possible with the Facebook API, but if it is, I’d love to see it get implemented. If not, I hope that sort of functionality is enabled somehow in the future.

Another idea for this sort of integration is with Twitpic photos. Many times, Twitter users will post a photo on Twitpic and tweet the link to it. This is currently one of the best ways to tweet single photos as they happen. When these tweets get to Facebook they are just a link in a status message. Facebook has its own well developed and well understood photo management system. A nicer integration would be where tweets with a Twitpic link (and other popular photo-tweeting services) could appear on Facebook as a photo wall post. That way, on facebook, users can discuss the photo, like it and tag it.

These are just some of the ways I think Twitter and facebook integration can be continued and improved, for the benefit of users on both platforms.