The Road to "Dublin": Looking for Puns... err, I mean, Pubs

Okay folks, the month of July has come to an end. This is my seventh and final "Road to Dublin" post. I had a couple of questions about why all these "Dublin" posts. When we incorporated the company 10 months ago, we happened to win a trip to Ireland courtesy of O'Byrne's Pub in Edmonton, Alberta. Two of the founders, Michael Mannion and I, went to visit in March, right in the middle of our first update to Empire Avenue. We named it Athenry, where we happened to be. It's a quirky story, and our next set of releases post-"Dublin" will be called "Erindale," another place on the Emerald Isle.

So what's coming for this final set of "Dublin" updates.

Major updates in our final "Dublin" set of releases, some of these have been released, some will be released during the day today (Friday, 30th July) and some will be there at the beginning of the week!

* Paypal: We will finally put in the ability for you to purchase Eaves using Paypal or through Paypal with your credit card. We believe the rates we've chosen reflect the overall health of the economy. Remember you cannot convert from Eaves to real money.

* Stock S'Talks aka Mentions: You will be able to see a headline stream of where your (e)TICKER is being mentioned on any stream that is connected to Empire Avenue! It could be a blog, it could be Twitter, Facebook or whatever else we put into the headline stream. Of course you still need to have the ability to see it, so if it is private you won't be able to see the mentions! Now, as of this feature, we are standardizing to one sort of stock ticker mention: (e)TICKER. This new stream will be available on the HOME page when ready.

* Improved Facebook Integration: We're improving Facebook slightly. After this update we will allow BlackBerry updates. We will also be doing more analysis of your Facebook data to bring it on par with what we look at when it comes to Twitter and Flickr. And this can only mean that all this is in preparation for Facebook Fan Pages, which is something we will be looking first thing in kicking off "Erindale" for the month of August!

* Improved Buy Notifications: The Buy e-mails are now batched and sent every 5 mins. This means that you won't get hundreds of emails/notifications when people flood and buy you in a short period of time! As part of this update, we also made a slight tweak to our on-site notification display showing the time the notification was created.

And that, as they say, is "it" for our July 2010 "Dublin" release. We think it's been a pretty good one, what about you? We have so much more to add, more improvements, but they will be coming as part of "Erindale" in August!

So please do provide us your thoughts: here, on the Feedback tab available on the site, by Twitter at @empireave, Facebook at /empireavenue and wherever else you can find us!