Today is your lucky day! You can buy shares of Tim Berry. Not only that, you can let others buy shares of you.
Empire Avenue is a new Social Media Exchange site where you can buy and sell your “friends” for virtual currency. Yes, it is a social investment game.
I am extremely interested in this concept and how it relates to human psychology. There are 2 factors at play. First is the greed factor of wanting to amass large wealth by investing strategically. Although it is virtual currency, it still fills a desire that some people have, and the risk is minimal (unless you waste way too much time there or you start purchasing extra shares with real money).
Next is the desire to be “desirable” by others. Will your value go up? How high? Are your friends and followers in your social network really that interested in you? If so, will they invest in you? Or who are the best bets for you to invest in among your friends…
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this all plays out. I see two possibilities with this site:
- Bottle rocket: extremely fast growth, followed by even faster crash
- Exponential, viral growth that is sustained and allows it to become a dotcom success story over the next 5 years.
For the latter to occur, they will need to add some other features in order to keep people interested. It may not be “social” enough to have the “stick” factor that other social behemoths have. There are chat boxes and communities, but only time will tell if these will become valuable or just spam rooms.
