From an Icentered point of view – my data, social network and my privacy and sharing preferences are mine to manage and use as I see fit. 2 new initiatives take this approach to different and opposing extremes.
Empire Avenue is a social media exchange platform game, where you buy and sell shares of people and of websites online through a stock market simulation. The game includes social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, YouTube, and the player’s own blog and RSS feeds.
Empire Avenue creates players’ portfolio in a virtual economy setting, like Monopoly on people, by driving their social media activity in the real world. Players choose their own ticker symbol, the price of a player’s share depends on the ticker’s stock buying and selling, based on social networking activity. They can conduct share like activities such as multiple investors, invest in other players, gain dividends from the other shares in players they invest in, and can win Achievements for their actions, such as advertising and adding services such as Twitter.
The game intertwines real world and play world, because real life social activity of play members , such as their social graph, RSS feeds and blogs, increases their game value which, in turn, is translated to dividends.
The game uses a virtual currency, Eaves, as a way to purchase shares in other players, that can either be people in your social network, or brands and companies that have social media accounts on Facebook – which turns it into a social marketing and mind share building tool for marketers.
Selling your Facebook friends and Twitter followers takes Empire Avenue to the most open social approach to a user’s own data, that by participating in the game, openly consents to trade with her social graph and be traded.
It can be viewed as a ranking system for social graphs, that builds evangelism, influencing and follower charts mechanisms that are the bread and butter of community dynamics. The data extracted from this social game draw profiles of influencers, leaders and initiators that can in turn become valuable in communities of interest.
User centricity takes an interesting open approach in Empire Avenue, as the thin line between reality and game is blurred in this game, once a player willingly becomes a part of a universal value index.
Can people’s stock like ranking have influence in their real life endeavors? Will players act socially online to increase their social worth and encourage others to invest in them? Will they be valued differently in the real world socially, in the job market? Is it good? Threatening? Exploitative? That’s very personal. However, just like in Second Life, the virtual world game, simulating and capitalizing on real world phenomena and rankings with virtual currency, to create a virtual world is very controversial. Only Empire Avenue blurs the borders even further and builds currency around real world people and their real data – it can serve from commercial interests and up to new circles of networking based on common denominators with people not originally in your social sphere, based on pointers and asset building of co-players.
Flink12 is the complete opposite. It’s a real life social network that brings back the authentic personalized touch to social networks by offering limited personalized networks of up to 12 friends in a circle, and empowers sharing of chats, photos and personally segregated blogs around topics and opinions. The approach of up to 12 people in a social circle around a shared interest, with an option to have the same person in several Flinks around different prisms of sharing. It takes a user centered control over the user’s social graph to a very private extreme, creating very small personal social spheres and making sure that those graphs are not indexed in the web in any search engine. Flink 12 is named after 12 cows that compose a flink.
It is a more relevance based networking way that brings intimacy back to private sharing of social online life. The small sharing in confined groups touches upon the fact that in the big social networks your list of friends does not really represent your human scale of personal relations. When you want to intimately share with a group of people around topics and experiences and don’t want to make it into public exposures – you can control the real sharing of personal information with just the people you want and actively control privacy and sharing considerations intuitively, easily.
Flink12 humanizes back the social online experience. In a social network era where one has hundreds of friends, personal touch is lost and we are all targeted by search engines and marketers, Flink12 brings back a personal touch of creating authentic first circle of really closed friends/family members/peers/co-workers around topics to shares humanifies back our social sphere to what it should have been – a really personal circle of communications.
By creating very private socializing maps that simulate more authentically our real- life personal socializing, as we don’t befriend 400 Facebook registered friends in a go and intuitively monitor what we share with whom. It empowers intuitive sharing by natural social groups such as close family, close friends/co-workers and allows the online instant spontaneity while keeping privacy, user control and personal segregation preferences.
These two extreme new evolutions of social spheres online strengthens the 2 sides of what experiences should be like – ubiquitous infrastructures and accessibility, on top of which on top of which user controlled segmented interwebs offer varied
interaction option for each one personally - another step towards a truly user centric web.
