I recently joined Empire Avenue after seeing some others talking about it on Google+. The concept behind EA is not as straight forward as your average social network. Yes, there are status updates, and communities on various topics where you can “socialize” with others. But the main backbone of the site is more of a stock market game, where the stocks are other people and businesses. You buy and trade others with “eaves” that you can generate in a number of different ways including fulfilling “missions“, from dividends on your “portfolio“, and of course by buying them (with real $$$). Conceptually, that’s a pretty interesting idea if you ask me. In practice it’s got some improvements to make.
I’ve been active on EA for the past week. My biggest gripe thus far is that a lot of the people and businesses on EA are simply looking for people to mindlessly like and share. So, we get into the territory of essentially just generating more social spam. The next biggest gripe would be that the targeting of missions isn’t exactly fleshed out as well as I think it could be. I think these two items sort of coincide with each other. If missions were categorized for instance, it would be much easier to find some on topics that you actually would have some interest in and as a result you wouldn’t have to ask people to “like bomb” your FB page, they’d do it naturally because they’re interested. Same thing goes for the ability to target missions. If you could target your missions to a specific demographic, the engagement on your missions might be a bit more genuine. Instead, there is a basic keyword search on missions, and many of the missions contain very little informative copy making it rather difficult to figure out what the mission’s topic is until you check things out for yourself. Lastly, it would be extremely helpful if you could find missions specific to a social platform. I don’t use FourSquare or Flickr, but I’m always on Facebook and Google+. Wouldn’t it be helpful if I could filter just the missions that take place on the social platforms that I use?
At the end of the day, I see Empire Avenue as a promising endeavour. A concept that’s still in a very early stage. It’s going through some growing pains at the moment, as it’s too easy for people to simply steal your Eaves without completing missions. But, I will say this of it…I’ve been on EA for one week…just 1 single week and I’ve nearly doubled the LIKES on my Facebook page. I’ve added tons of followers on my Twitter page. And I’ve networked with some really nice people. So, for what it’s worth, without having spent a dime of real money: Empire Avenue is VERY MUCH worth adding to your social schedule.
Now go buy me: http://www.empireavenue.com/TRANSCENDEV?t=5c8zd94y :)
