A new way of identifying influencers?

This is an interesting idea for a method of finding influencers (or indeed, being found) for a particular topic.  The ‘Empire Avenue’ game generates a ‘share price’ for you based on how well connected you are via your Facebook, Twitter and other social media profiles.  Members of the site can then ‘invest’ in you and take part in a virtual trading game.  Once you have invested in someone, you will see updates from them and other investments within your virtual trading account…

What’s interesting to me here is that everyone has a limited amount of virtual funds (although I’m not clear how you build your funds right now), which means that subscriptions (or ‘investments’) to a particular user could be considered more significant than a simple Twitter ‘follow’ for which there are no limits.

Could this be a new type of link graph which provides additional value to those within Facebook and Twitter’s data centers?

 

Chris Moore is a Program Manager working on Search Engine Optimisation at Microsoft.  Follow him on Twitter