East of Erindale: Breaking it down

Yes, we're in a bit of a silent mode right now at Empire Avenue, but only on the public front! Behind the scenes, we're making changes – lots and lots of little changes that may or may not affect you, and we are purposefully concentrating on just getting stuff done! Here are a couple changes that we released that we thought we'd highlight!

1. Email Notification Settings

No, we haven't taken anything away. To make it easier for newer users, we've decided to give you the choice of "E-mail Presets." The choices are "Default," "Hourly Digest," "Daily Digest" and "No Email." However, you can customize your settings at any time and choose individual settings per notification type. To aid in your customization, we've added a couple more digest options: Hourly and Daily.

New users will see their e-mail settings for most options set to an Hourly Digest, while older users can stick with their selection of the Six-Hourly Digest or switch settings around to whichever digest option they prefer.

In addition, our e-mail format has changed. The Digest e-mails now group together the different notifications, and the individual e-mails contain a bit more information and will have even more purpose over time.

We're not completely done with e-mails. Sometime in the next two weeks, you will also see us remove the daily email (you can choose to enable it again if you want to continue to receive it), and have a weekly email, which will show better information on how your activity and earnings are doing on the Avenue :).

2. Share Price Breakdowns

Clicking on the share price on a profile, on the Home page, or on individual Influencer Scores now brings up a Share Price Breakdown with more information. We highlight how much of your Share Price is based on long-term social media scores and how much on shorter-term virtual share buys. We also highlight your Audience and Quality terms for each Influence Score. This is an evaluation of the size and quality of your Audience on each network, and the Quality of the interactions you have with your audience.

Please note the following important facts about your virtual share price: The social-activity component of your share price operates on a long-term model (Influence Scores operate on an even longer-term model). In other words, being extremely active on Twitter for a single day will probably not result in a major increase of the social media component of your Share Price or your Twitter Influence Score, but if you sustain this activity for many days and weeks then you should see steady gains in both Share Price and Influence Score. Of course, being highly active on social media might get people to buy into you, and you will see immediate gains from that.

You might also note that we have many more Social Networks with the addition of Facebook Pages and YouTube. We want you to be active on those networks that you want to be active on; we don't want to penalize you for inactivity on some networks. We only take into account at most your five most active Social Networks.

These are but 2 of the 14 changes we have pushed up to the site over the last 2 weeks as part of Erindale (did I ever mention how incredible our team is)! As always we thank our gracious community. Over the past six months you've watched us grow from absolutely nothing to what we are today and have had to deal with many User Interface changes, because of you, we have learned lots. We have a plan (as we always had) going forward and we think you'll be super excited. We'll go back into our radio silence now, but you know, think about it as the "Calm Before The Storm" :)