Tag Archives: social media

Jun201006

ritwik

0

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.


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Apr201022

admin

9

Adding a Facebook like button to my Wordpress blog

In case you haven’t heard the news yet, Facebook wants to take over the world. Well, eventually. For now, they’ll settle for just taking over the internet. At the keynote for this year’s f8 conference (Facebook’s developer conference), Zuckerberg announced a few changes to Facebook that will essentially allow users to carry their social networks wherever they go, and have the interactions they take part in around the web logged back to their Facebook profiles. One of the key parts of this is the new ‘like’ button. The like button is an iframe that can be added to any page, pure html, that will allow a user to like content on that page. The key thing here is that the user doesn’t need to connect to the site, and and the site will not need any of the user’s personal information. As long as the user is logged into facebook on that browser, the ‘like’ just works. No extra steps. No permissions needed. *In theory* more likes, since it’s a single quick click.

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.


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