HOW TO: Buy and Sell Shares of Your Friends

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Purely as a game, Empire Avenue is incredibly addictive. Within a few minutes of signing up, filling out my profile, connecting my profile links and creating my own stock symbol (FILM), I was already getting notifications that people were buying shares of me, and subsequently I started looking at ways to buy shares in others. Obviously the goal is to be able to amass not only a valuable portfolio of people you follow and invest in, but to also build value in your own personal stock.While the idea of matching advertisers to influencers strikes us as being super smart, we have to admit, purely as a social game, Empire Avenue has lots of potential. Add an iPhone app into the mix and this could easily become a great way to bring day-trading into the Twitter age.

Invites

Empire Avenue is still in the invite-only beta stages, but the creators have been nice enough to offer 200 Mashable readers access. Just follow @EmpireAve on Twitter and retweet this post. The first 200 people that retweet will get invitations into the beta.Once you get into the beta, you can invite a few of your friends along too. If you want to have an addictive time buying and trading virtual influence shares, give Empire Avenue a shot.

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