Every once in a while I bump into something that is inviting enough to give it a further look and try. One of those sites I stumbled upon is called Empire Avenue. It is basically a game, but you can do way more with it.

First of all when you setup an account, your value is determined by the networks you connect to it. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, you name it. You start with 10000 shares and others can buy your shares, giving you credits, called Eaves in this game.

At first glance I thought: what the heck is this and why would one look into this? The answer: this is a community building, interactive meeting place for people with likeminded interests. It is easy to get in touch with someone that has expressed interest in the same hobbies or sports as you, just by buying shares of them. They will get notified and most likely figure out who you are in return. I’m still not sure if there’s any value in this besides a couple of hours of fun playing around with it, but the moment I find out I will let y’all know.

Empire Avenue can be found here.

The ‘social’ aspect of social media sometimes gets forgotten ~ tweeting to share links, pictures or all kinds of other cool content is fun, but it is more fun to actually socialize with others.

This Saturday after a succesful ‘social media networking for non profits’ event, hosted by @frith64 being @Tweet4OK, a group of fervent twitter enthousiasts decided to give birth to the first Okanagan twitter chat.

Mondays at 7PM everyone can follow the timeline searching the hashtag #okchat and join the conversation online using twitter.

A great tool to do this is Tweetchat.  It automatically refreshes and finds all tweets that have the #okchat hashtag or any other tag you fill out in the box at the top of the program. If you reply or tweet from tweetchat, it automagically adds the hashtag to your tweet so you can’t forget.

We noticed however, that participants that have a protected timeline will not show up in tweetchat. When the chat goes really fast, it may also start to hiccup and miss a couple of updates, so always have a search column in tweetdeck or hootsuite ready as fallback.

The first #okchat was a great success! Lasting about one hour, #okchat reached the ‘trending topic in Canada’ status with nearly 500 tweets by nearly 30 participants.  The open structure of twitter sending the hashtag to all followers of all participants had quite a few others bump into the conversation. They would not have found it if not for Twitter…

See y’all next Monday at 7PM on #okchat!

Image by @HighTechDad