Empire Avenue is an interesting take on the “social” trend on the Internet. What you do is you buy shares in someone else hoping that their social interactions on and off the site will send the stocks up in value and you in turn, as an investor, makes money in return. You are allotted a certain shares to begin with that people can trade in and as your value goes up more shares are made available and so on. You can connect your other social platform into Empire Avenue . EA looks at the network activity on each of these platforms as assigns a “network score”. This in turn helps drive up score. Granted its only been slightly over 24 hours since I joined the site and there are still tons of things that are left for me to figure out. If you are in the same boat, here is an interesting article by Chris Pirillo on tips and strategies. The fun aspect of stock trading aside, the biggest upside for me was the number of people that I have been able to connect to and follow on twitter and other platforms. I haven’t connected any of my other platforms with EA besides Twitter and this blog since they are public anyways. And while privacy may be dead I am still hesitant and skeptical when I see connection warnings stating my information on sites that I have reserved for close friends and family (yeah I belong to that minority of folks who still use Facebook for that purpose) can be accessed on by behalf even if I havent granted explicit permission to do so. It is however a fascinating site to be on and I have found myself checking ever so often to see if there is even the slightest movement in stock prices – either of my portfolio or just my own!