If you are on the Empire Avenue Stock Market, you will know that every day for several hours we do a “Daily Close” during which Dividends are paid to you from those you have invested in. This payout currently happens on a per investment basis. This process is about to change as follows:

1. Instead of many small payments, we will make one lump sum payment of Dividends into your Empire Avenue Eaves Bank account

2. You will have a way to view your full list of that day’s Dividends. We are still deciding the manner in which this will be made available.

We are doing this for a number of reasons.

1. It will reduce the load through which we are experiencing during our Daily Close so that we can make the Daily Close go faster for everyone.

2. It will reduce the calls to our support as it is confusing to get many multiple payments into your bank account over several hours especially if you are not paying attention.

Please note, we are not changing the amounts paid out in Dividends with this update, but only when you receive the full payment. As part of this change we anticipate that our Daily Close will initially take just as long as now so you can expect that full Dividend payment to happen around mid-day Eastern  Time or thereabouts. Over time we hope to change when you receive your Dividend payout and the speed of the Daily Close in general.

We cannot tell you exactly which day this week or next the change will happen on this blog, we suggest you follow the Empire Avenue General Discussion community as we will post it there.

Today we are happy to announce a new feature to help keep your portfolio organized on the Empire Avenue Stock Market, and to keep track of your “Fresh Face” investments. As pictured you will now be able to view your portfolio based on the age of the various profiles that you have invested in as well as seeing the “Fresh Face” icon in the portfolio. What this means for you is that it is now easier to track the progress of Empire Avenue rookies who you have invested in, and it should be much easier to see how these investments are faring for you. This should also make it easier to tell when a Fresh Faced user has left that stage of their Empire Avenue career, and moved on to a world of bigger, and better dividends.

This is just one of the many upcoming changes we hope will make the time you spend on various parts of Empire Avenue more convenient.

We would also like to acknowledge (e)RICTOWNSEND (Richard Townsend) for repeated reminders that a feature such as this would be greatly appreciated within the Empire Avenue community and also his and others’ patience while we rolled out our latest set of updates that facilitated this. Thanks Richard!

Today we are releasing a new update to EmpireAvenue.com that updates our navigation and consolidates many of the styles and look throughout the service. The impetus for this update is to continue along the path towards accomplishing our mission for Empire Avenue where you will realize real value for your reputation and the networks you have built online.

Navigation

• Expand, Engage and Evaluate is no longer a message that we will be using on the service. As such, Expand, Engage and Evaluate are no  longer links that are in the top sub menu. You can find “Evaluate” in the username drop down, or as a tab on your profile page as you are of course evaluating your own network connections
• Engage has been replaced with a relatively new home page which we’ve had for a couple of weeks, but expect that to be the focus of much attention and updates going forward. The page now features people and missions we have highlighted for you using our algorithms as well as Recent Shareholders, Mentions and Arrivals as before. You can reach this page by clicking “Home” on the top bar, or the Empire Avenue logo.
• Expand has been replaced by a new section called “Discover” where we will be able to give you options to discover new people and their services now and into the future. Expect further updates to the Discover dashboard.

• Leaderboards for people/profiles, Search and Recent Arrivals are all under Discover now.
• The Communities Leaderboard is now in the Community section as “Top Communities”
• The Empire Avenue Shop has been reduced to two pages, taking out unneeded complexity.
• The About Us, FAQs, Support and help are in one place for you peruse with their own navigation. Our FAQs have been updated in the last week and we suggest you take a gander at them as well

Other Changes

• Leaderboards: Leaders are now pulled more realtime and not once a day
• Leaderboards: Recent Arrivals are now back to being by the week a profile joined, giving you more leaderboards to discover new people
• Leaderboards: Several leaderboards which showed incorrect data (such as Weekly Earnings) were retired
• Leaderboards: My Social Networks has been removed as a leaderboard, the data was not accurate and caused performance issues
• Lists: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Friends on Empire Avenue as sortable lists have been removed, we will be working on ways to notify you of when a friend joins better than we do today!
• Bank: Achievements no longer give any income, so that line item has been removed
• Missions: History page display fixed
• Profile: Hovering over the network score now correctly gives you the network activity.

Previous weeks changes

• In case you are not a member of the Empire Avenue General Discussion Community or do not visit there often, some of our other changes have included Missions Enhancements, more useful Mentions, New Block Policy (implemented and active as of May 6th) and many more.

There are numerous small fixes throughout the site and many other enhancements that you cannot see (as always), way more than we can actually list. Many of these changes may seem minor but move us towards a greater consistency with which we can make changes more easily and reliably.

If you would like to keep abreast with updates on what we are releasing, please join the Empire Avenue General Discussion Community on Empire Avenue here!

Over the past two weeks and more the Empire Avenue staff have done a fairly extensive analysis of how we handle “Blocking”, “Muting” and what it means to the site now and into the future. We are aware that Blocking is handled inconsistently throughout the service and this blog post is a start to fixing those inconsistencies now and into the future.

To aid in fixing the issues we have written up a “Block Policy” which we have shared below. It is our manifesto on what “Block” and “Mute” are meant to do, over the next two weeks (up to May 6th 2013) we will take the time to make sure that “Block” and “Mute” are implemented exactly as written below. There will be some changes you should be aware of:

1. You may be kicked out and blocked from Communities where you have blocked the Founder or they have blocked you.

2. You may see content and profiles that you have blocked, because as noted below, Block is meant to disable direct interaction between people (as noted below).

3. You may be unable to interact with people you have already blocked in various parts of the service where you might have been able to do before as we implement Block fully.

Please be aware of what “Blocking” will do by May 6th 2013, and we will ensure that all our on-site documentation reflects what will happen as described below.

Again, this policy is what is intended, and between now and May 6th 2013, the service will reflect the policy below!

Continue reading →

Hi all, we’ve been busy behind the scenes over in Empire Avenue land, but we wanted to let you know that we thought we should let Rudiger, our Empire Avenue squirrel, dress up as the easter bunny. His first task was to drive a sale on Eaves with a 20% off sale! To take advantage of the sale, simply go straight to our Shop and purchase any of the items marked on sale!

If you’ve wanted to Create a Mission and didn’t have the Eaves to do it with, take advantage of the sale which will end Tuesday April 2, 2013!

If you have yet to run a Mission (gasp!*!) as you don’t have access yet, we might have left an Easter Egg for something cool to purchase to get you started as well… but we’ll tell you more about that… next week

As with City and Interest Communities, there comes a time when we have to look at each feature and decide on whether a particular thing fits with the vision for where Empire Avenue is and where it’s going. Many months ago, maybe a year ago, we deprecated Indexes. In a couple of days, we will remove them entirely from the system. Many of you have likely forgotten that Indexes even existed so this should not come too much as a surprise. To those unfamiliar with Indexes: Indexes allowed you to choose one subject and allow you to rise to a rank of CEO or otherwise.

Why are we removing indexes? It’s nice and all to say it “doesn’t fit”, but why?!

1. Indexes were based on a flawed and too weird algorithm. Anyone could rise in any given Index whether it was really topical to them or not and hence was of limited value in judging why someone would be good or not. The algorithm itself was way too hard to explain on why you rose and why you fell and frankly wasn’t very good.

2. Indexes showed no basis for reputation in any given subject. Yes they were fun, but not where we want to be with that aspect of Empire Avenue.

What’s replacing them?

We do have a plan to replace Indexes or at least what we wanted them to represent in the first place. The replacement will come in due course, but first we need to go about removing what isn’t working. Indexes will be fully removed from the system by Friday morning, March 8, 2013.

This weekend EmpireAvenue.com celebrates its 3rd anniversary. That theoretically means that we are now officially into toddler-hood! We think we’re past the crawling and are now shakily getting up on our feet to walk… this can only mean good things for the future!

I’d like to thank everyone who has supported EmpireAvenue.com to be around for three years, especially the amazing Community and our incredible Staff and Investors. Very few companies can claim the amount of engagement we’ve seen over three years and I am personally more impassioned about the future of EmpireAvenue.com than I have ever been in the three years since we launched.

Here are a few birthday presents in the Shop to celebrate!

1. We’re releasing more pie!
   • That’s right, invest more in those you have maxed out in. Pie #15 is available right now in the Shop.
2. For this weekend only, we’re enabling a new Bonus to eliminate the reward fee for Missions
   • This Bonus will only be available in the Shop over the weekend and will allow 5 missions with no reward fee. You can buy the Bonus as many times as you like over the weekend and any remaining uses will expire in 15 days from purchase. Bonus is available right now in the Shop.
3. We’re having a sale on Eaves!
   • For everyone, Eaves are on sale right now!

Now more than ever, we seem to understand what we need to do to fulfill the vision of Empire Avenue as part of a global Reputation Economy. We’ve solved many problems, tested so many ideas, fallen flat on our face more times than I can count and stood up afterwards, brushed off the dust and continued. Now we can see a clear path to the future that will take us there along with new and old blood who will be joining us for the ride both in our community and our company.

At this point I could wax poetic on what’s coming, but honestly just watch this space. We’re in for a fantastically interesting and compelling 4th year.

Yours truly on behalf of Empire Avenue Inc., The Team and our Investors
Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana
CEO / Co-Founder

As we move forward with Empire Avenue, we have to make some hard decisions on what parts of the product we want to support. When we created Empire Avenue Communities, part of our reasoning was to allow people to gather together in groups, discover each other based on their interests and locations and participate in a global Empire Avenue Community.

What we have since discovered is that while Personal Communities have thrived (those created by and managed by an individual or few individuals), most of the City and Interest Communities have withered and died from spam, lack of ownership and lack of direction. Increasingly Empire Avenue is about your networks and the value your networks bring to you and others, and while City and Interest Communities worked when we first launched them, they no longer fit in the future we wish to build.

As such, we are announcing the removal of City and Interest Communities as of February 28th 2013.

• If there are discussions that you were/are involved with in City and Interest Communities, we suggest that you contact others participating in City and Interest Communities and let them know.
• We will block access to City and Interest Communities and only allow Personal Communities.
• We will automatically remove you as members of City and Interest Communities.
• You will no longer be able to target Missions towards City and Interest Communities (such Missions only amounted to a handful every month and their completion rates are far far below our Missions averages). We will instead explore new ways to target Missions separately.

Removing City and Interest Communities will allow us to concentrate our development and community building efforts on Personal Communities which have been created by individuals to support and bring value to their own networks.