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.
