What is Empire Avenue? Well, It’s a stock market game where you can buy or sell people that has a social media account such as Twitter, Facebook or an Empire Avenue account.

Here is what the company itself says it is:
“Empire Avenue is the Social Media Exchange, where you can buy and sell shares in any social media profile, meet new people, unlock Achievement badges, and earn boatloads of virtual cash by being active and social online! Buy shares in your friends, your followers, people with similar interests, brands you love, celebrities – anyone! All using a virtual currency and all for free!”

So, Empire Avenue can be as simple as this. You buy and sell shares in people and others buy and sell shares in you.

When you first register you start off with 10.000 shares that people can buy from you. For each share they buy, you get money. At first you will get 50% of the income. When you start selling more shares the income you get will be lower (starts on 50% and goes down to 10%). As you sell more shares, the system will enable more available shares to sell, but you are free to disable share upgrades. Each day you will get investment earnings based on your portfolio (people/brands that your have invested in). The more wealth you generete and invest, the more investment earnings each day you will get. Pretty simple. At first the income you get each day, will mostly be based on how many shares you sell. But over time the investment earnings you get from your portfolio will be bigger than the income from share sales.

At the beginning it was only possible to buy shares in Empire Avenue accounts. But not long ago, they opened up the possibility to invest in anyone with a Twitter account or a Facebook account even if they do not have an EAv account. A clever move, giving the site a much more viral marketing effect, but also making the site more complex to use and understand.

People have all sorts of different strategies. During the first year the company made some huge changes to the site and rules, making it difficult to stick to one strategy from day one. It is not easy to dive into the strategy part but I can say a few words around my own strategy when it comes to building wealth. First and foremost I am more focused on investment earnings than on my share price. The following elements is all part of my strategy: Investment earnings (dividends), Investment in shares with share price potential, Long-term investment in people doing the same in me also if they have low activity or low ROI and contribution to the communities among others. I think that if you are not a social guy in the sense that you are not using Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or other services it will be hard for you to actually sell shares and start building wealth. But everything is possible.

The gaming nature of Empire Avenue is highly addictive. A few weeks ago, I actually deleted my account on Empire Avenue. It was mostly because I felt it took up too much of my time. I did not actually use that much time each day, but my focus on building wealth took up most of the time that was spent om the site. When I deleted my account I had just reached top 15 on the wealth leaderboard worldwide. After a week I regretted and started all over again. But this time my focus is not only on the competitive aspect and be on the leaderboard, but also on finding new connections, and great content from people. Besides the gaming part that is one of the cool things about Empire Avenue. It is easy to discover, connect and share content based on your interrests.

So, why do Empire Avenue have a potential? I think it is because the combination of so many interresting aspects. The social part where the platform not only is based on what you do on other social platforms but also building up a great social place on their own is clever. They seem to have great potential in developing a platform that is ideal for advertisers and brands to get so closely integrated with the consumer as possible, that will lay the foundation for exciting business models.

The last couple of weeks, the site has had some big viral breakthrough in the sense that some “big guys” from the Valley has entered Empire Avenue, started to tweet and blog about it. The number of registered users must have gone through the roof in the last month or so.

Her is some initial reactions from Jeremiah Owyang on how this tool will impact consumers and the opportunities for brands and threats for other vendors.

And here is a pretty funny review of Empire Avenue by Chris Pirillo:

The photos is lisenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License

Carlos Ghosn, Chairman & CEO, Renault S.A. & Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.

Charlie Kindel, GM, WP7 Developer Ecosystem, Microsoft Corporation

Jason Goldman, VP of Product, Twitter

Beathe Due – Telenor Group “Clouds and Concerts. New music experiences”

Marissa Mayer, VP, Google

Matt Mullenweg, Founder and Toni Schneider, CEO, Automattic

Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation – Q&A with Robert Scoble, American Blogger, Tech Evangelist & Author

Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation – Q&A with Robert Scoble, American Blogger, Tech Evangelist & Author

Thought Controlled Computing – Ariel Garten, CEO, Interaxon

I have not used it for quite a while, but some tweets before the weekend got my attention to it. So I just had to check if it was still working. And of course it does. I was pretty sure that it would work, but I was more unsure if it still wanted to play around with iTunes. No worry it worked smoothly! No software update since I upgraded it many years ago – iTunes states that my software version 1.5 is the latest. It will check for updates though.

I found out one more thing…

If i put my iPhone 4 on top of my old iPhone 3G, they actually match my old iPod exactly when it comes to height! I do not believe this to be an coincidence. Nope.. it just can´t be

Updated on May 27th 2011:
Since I have found my photo on a few articles and blog posts – I have added a CC license to this photo with attribution (instead of asking you to pull it from the articles/posts ):

Updated on October 23th 2011:
iPod Turns 10 Years Old Today: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/23/ipod-turns-10-years-old-today

The photos is lisenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License

Both Bono, Adam and The Edge are taken close up, while talking to us and giving autographs. Cool guys they are! I hope they always have to sing that song…

The photos is lisenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License

Bono in action:

Adam in action:

The Edge in action:

Of course U2 has their own camera crew that takes photos during their tour. Here they are in action:

But what about Larry? Well he desided to hide himself..
They where off to sound check before the concert tonight, but spent 20 minutes with their fans first.

Updated 05.09.2010:
I have uploaded some more photos to Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elarre

The photos is lisenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License

“..centered on a fully editable Spotify music profile, with the ability to publish playlists, top artists and top tracks for public view. Discovering these profiles is simple as we’ve connected with Facebook so that you can instantly add your friends’ profiles“.

This is cool. I tried it out, but I was surprised about their implementation of the Facebook integration. in this blog post I´ll describe what I think is some weakness with this implementation, and would love to get some dialog/comments from you. Maybe it´s only me that thinks it´s a problem?

Connecting to Facebook

The first thing is to connect to Facebook. In the new Spotify you´ve got a profile located in the right column. The profile typically consists of your playlists (that is published) and your top artists and top tracks. All your friends on Facebook will be able to see this as default (but is possible to change). There are two ways to log into Facebook from Spotify. You may use the menu at your profile at the top right. Or you may choose to click on the bottom right button asking you to import your friends.

Choosing to connect to Facebook will prompt you to log in to your Facebook account (E-mail and Password). This is done through a new window inside Spotify. After you log in to your account on Facebook, you will have the following options:

What Spotify asks for is the following (to be able to connect Spotify to Facebook you must accept this )

• access to your information on Facebook (name, picture, list of friends etc)
• access to your wall (for posting of messages etc )
• acces to your news feed
• offline acces to your account (when you are not using Spotify)

Spotify takes full control over your wall

What happens when you accept? Well, go to Facebook and look at your profile. Spotify automatically posts to your wall that you have just activated Facebook for Spotify making it easier to find friends’ Spotify playlists. This is done without asking me. In my opinion this is a weakness with Spotify´s integration with Facebook. Spotify takes away my control over my own wall on Facebook. What they should have done, was to alert me that they where about to post to my wall, and let me choose not to do so if I did not want that information out. Another issue with this, is that everytime you disconnect Facebook from Spotify and connect again, this information is posted to your wall. Kind of make me feel like a big time spammer actually. Here is how it looks like:

When connected to Spotify my friends on Facebook that has also connected their account to Spotify appears in a list. Now you are able to dive into each of them and look at their profiles and information as described above. I found a published playlist from one of my friends and subscribed to it. What do you think is happening now? Well, let´s go over to my Facebook profile again. On my wall a new post from Spoitify has appeared. The action of subsribing to a playlist is announced on my wall. Again this is done without any warning or information. If you really work with your friends playlist, subsrcribe to many of them, I bet you will get a bit frustrated when looking at your Facebook wall seeing all your actions there.

For each action I should have been prompted with a question letting me decide to post or not. Here is how this post on my wall looks like:

Working with the settings

Since Spotify have no functionality that let us have control over what is actually posted to the wall – playing the “all or nothing” game, I have chosen to restrict Spotify´s access to my profile. You may do this in two ways. The easiest one is to just to disable the postings to Facebook inside the profile settings in Spotify. The other option is to go to your Facebook account, choosing Spotify from the application settings, and uncheck the Spotify´s ability to access your wall.

I really hope Spotify develops the functionality that let me choose from action to action what I will post on my wall. The implementation today is not user-friendly as far as I see this, but of course from Spotify´s view of it, it is a sneaky way to go viral on Facebook.

NYPD Helicopter on top of Empire State Building, NYC. Taken Spring 2009.

The photos is lisenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License

A great experience. Some guys in a NYPD helicopter had fun by flying over our heads on top of the Rockefeller Center, before flying towards the Empire State.

Here are some more photos of the NYPD Helicopter, taken from the top of the Rockefeller Center:

This photo is lisenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

Taken for the #TwPhCh 004 «De 4 elementer: Jord, Vann, Vind, Brann»

Illustrates the element “Wind”. Taken on the last day in may 2009.

Raindrops on protected wood (oiled), with small fraction of pollen. Spring 2009.

Taken for the #TwPhCh 004

Illustrates the element Water

This photo is taken back in 2007 and is showing the beautiful coastline in Biarritz, France. It is taken from the top of the lighthouse. If you ever get here – you have to try out the traditional food.

Amazon web services

Let’s start with Amazon CloudFront and what this actually is. CloudFront is a Content Distribution Network (CDN). The service distributes your data out to multiple datacenter locations, ensuring faster access times. It works together with another service from Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). Amazon S3 is a data storage service where your files is stored initially. To be using CloudFront for distribution you need to have a S3 account and store the files there.

Setting up an Amazon Web Services account
As I have blogged about before, I use Amazon S3 already, so it was not necessary for me to create an Amazon Web Services account. If you do not have an Amazon Web Services account head over here to register. After you have registered, you must enable both the Amazon S3 service and the Amazon CloudFront service to your account (just follow the links and sign up).

With an AWS account and enabled both S3 and CloudFront to this account I was ready to start experimenting. Amazon Web Services is just services. This means that they only offers their services via APIs. Uploading a file to your S3 account must be done by a client. If you are a programmer it’s easy to just develop a client, but there are a lot of clients/programs around. An easy and simple client is S3Fox, a Firefox extension that that lets you upload files to Amazon S3 and manage the files’ access control. I use S3 Browser, a great application that handles the administration of my S3 files. Using S3Fox or S3 Browser makes it easy to test the S3 and CloudFront account, making sure it works. Objects (or files) are organized into buckets that can be created, listed, and retrieved using either a REST-style HTTP interface or a SOAP interface.

Update: As Andy says in a comment to this post (thanks Andy!), another client that you could try out is CloudBerry Explorer for Windows or S3HUB for Mac.

The first thing I had to do was to grab the AWS Access Key and the AWS Secret Access Key. Log in to the AWS account and click on ‘Security Credentials’ in the left menu. The first thing I did was to set up the S3 Browser account with this Access Key and Secret Key. I created my bucket and named it ‘static.larre.com‘, then uploaded some files to be sure everything worked:

Testing S3 bucket

Setting up CloudFront for my WordPress blog
Now I had an Amazon Web Services account, enabled Amazon S3, installed S3 Browser, created a bucket named ‘static.larre.com’, and uploaded files to this bucket. So far so good. Time to concentrate on the Amazon CloudFront and how to integrate it into my blog, that runs WordPress. There are several approaches that can be used. I have tried a couple of different approaches that I’ll try to describe.

Using Dreamhost
Besides hilarious monthly newsletters DreamHost is a great web hosting company. I use DreamHost for hosting of this blog. Last year DreamHost integrated CloudFront into their hosting service. A pretty amusing blog post from DreamHost about it is here. With CloudFront as a “Goodie-service” smoothly integrated in my hosting environment it is really simple to get started. The step is to create a cloudfront domain filling out this form:

CloudFront Domain

What it does is to create a directory where you can put all files and directories that is going to be stored at S3 and distributed by CloudFront. A very simple admin view where you can handle simple tasks like delete, rescan etc is also part of this “goodies” service. When creating the CloudFront Domain, DreamHost creates a distribution for you at Amazon CloudFront. A distribution specifies the location of the original version of your objects. A distribution has a unique CloudFront.net domain name that you can use to reference your objects through the network of edge locations. If you wish, you can also map your own domain name to your distribution. DreamHost adds a CNAME record (in this case it was ‘static’), that has the cloudfront.net address as value. Using a CNAME enables me to use a domain name (in this case static.larre.com) instead of the domain name CloudFront provides. So looking at my own CloudFront distribution I have the following:

• http://static.larre.com (my own mapped domain to the distribution)
• http://d20o1nml9my7kd.cloudfront.net (the unique cloudfront.net domain)
• http://static.larre.com.s3.amazonaws.com (the origin bucket at S3)

One of the most annoying thing about this service, is the lag from I request a rescan until my files are uploaded to S3. During the test period for the last couple of days it has taken everything from 10 minutes to several hours before DreamHost actually did rescan and upload/delete files in my S3 bucket. When DreamHost had finished scanning the directory and uploaded the files to S3, they where accessible. It seems that the only way to upload files is to do it manually within the DreamHost Admin Panel.

Using the service from Dreamhost may be a bit simple and manually copying all the needed files to the specified directory is not a very elegant solution. A more scalable solution is to make some scripts and jobs that pretty much does the work for you. Here is a blog post that describes one solution to make scripts and jobs for copying static files from Dreamhost to Cloudfront.

Adding a WordPress plugin
To work with my CloudFront Domain (http://static.larre.com), I tested a simple WordPress Plugin: ‘My CDN’. This plugin help you offloading javascript, css and theme files to your own CDN network, but only handle url rewriting not actual file transferring. Installing the plugin, activating it, and then adding three input fields under the settings section, was pretty much what I had to do (here is a screenshot of the settings page). One of the problems with this setup and solution, is that I have to manually put files in the specific directory (as described under the DreamHost section) unless I write a bunch of script-code. I think a better solution is to develop or find an already developed plugin that handles the prefixing of static content and also the upload to S3.

I’ve found one plugin: W3 Total Cache developed by Frederick Townes It’s a plugin improving the user experience of your blog by adding page caching, database caching, minify, content delivery network (CDN) functionality and more. Late last year they implemented integration with AWS and CloudFront. I have used the WP Super Cache until now, but it’s necessary to deactivate it before trying to install and activating the W3 Total Cache. Setting up this plugin is straight forward. After installing the plugin and activated it, I rolled over to the settings sections. First of all I had to activate the CDN and chose Amazon CloudFront as the CDN Type. Under the CDN settings I had to enter my Access Key, Secret Key, bucket and CNAME:

cdn settings

The plugin makes it easy to upload whatever static content you have on your WordPress blog to CloudFront. In the settings sections you specify extensions and files for upload to S3. During the testing period (a couple of days) I have found one issue with this plugin. I use WPtouch. It is a mobile theme, that automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device. The default settings for W3 Total Cache captured the mobile devices and bypassed WPtouch. I solved it by adding mobile user agents in the corresponding field under the settings for page cache, minify and CDN.

As far as I can see, the DreamHost integration is not the solution for integrating my WordPress blog with Amazon CloudFront. With other needs than to get static WP content out to the edges it may be a nice functionality. But probably you will have to write some scripts and batch jobs working with the CloudFront directory before you get an elegant and effective solution. The W3 Total Cache plugin seems to be an easy and effective tool to use for mye goal. Setting up an AWS account, enabling S3 and CloudFront and adding a CNAME record is what you have to do before working with the plugin. Everything else seems to be achievable within the settings section.

Everything that is referenced with http://static.larre.com is now hosted by Amazon S3 and distributed out by Amazon CloudFront services.