State of the Empire after 90 Days

We've now been online three months with Empire Avenue. To those that have been with us since the very beginning, I say a heartfelt thank you. Every single individual who has been on Empire Avenue in the past three months – whether for a few minutes, a few weeks or the whole time – has provided us with a wealth of information that will help us develop a site that we can all be proud of. We kept saying, this is a beta, this site will change, this site will evolve and we meant every word of that.

Our commitment remains to the following:

Provide meaningful ways to connect individuals in value relationships and eventually allow individuals to capitalize on their online influence and value to realize true monetary rewards.

But what now? What you have seen on empireavenue.com is one third of the initial vision here at Empire Avenue. We gave you a stock market to value your virtual influence and have a bit of fun doing so. In a few weeks we'll reveal the second part of the vision. I don't want to give away too much, as features get "triaged" on a daily basis and I would hate to disappoint you all if a specific feature gets pushed to the next release. That said, some of the things which we will address in our next release:

- Connecting with each other in communities on Empire Avenue
- Revised, reworked Headline Streams
- More connectivity to external sites outside of Twitter and Facebook
- New Leaderboards
- New Market Makers

The last may well be the most important. We've been watching to see what activity and influence means and also what being active on our virtual stock exchange has meant. That necessitates changes to our market makers. Remember, while this is a bit of a game, it's all about encouraging you to expand your influence, and we realize that each site, each service has a different marker for what constitutes "influence." We're aiming to capture that like no other application has done before.

Those that are with us now, you are helping to create something special. We don't just want to create something that is a game that lasts for a few weeks or months; we want to create something truly groundbreaking. Many of you have been tremendously active on the site, and we’re really happy you’re enjoying it… but the features coming in the next few weeks and months will, we hope, make the site even more enjoyable and useful.

So the state of the Empire is thus: We are not done yet. Not by a long shot.