The New Empire Avenue Inside and Out

Empire Avenue (EA) launches the new look of its website, as you can see from the pic. For someone who has seen the previous webpage, I have to say this is an improvement in terms of conciseness, as you can now see most of the site in one go. But as far as joining EA, it's still an invite-only affair, as the Create Account button will only work if you supply an email address that's been invited to the beta. That pretty much solves the mystery to me of why the Invite Key box at the lower right still remains. But I feel that there wasn't enough information about EA still being in invite-only mode that an average user could end up confused, a bit turned-off even, that they went so far as to click the Create Account button only to find out they don't yet qualify. And the information at the sign-up page isn't really much of a help either. I guess if you aren't that eager to join, you wouldn't even consider going back to check and find out that there's this Invite Key thing at the bottom.

Inside, the List thing has been implemented, to replace the Follow feature. It's a good thing that you can add one person to several lists. How useful this setup is still remains to be seen. Personally, I find that there's more than a handful of default groupings already. Since it has a Recommended Buy portion, it just might be another one of those "recommend me, I will recommend you" sort of thing. The good thing is, if I am not mistaken, they've already removed the Achievement related to the number of Followers that you have. It jut might be that this time around, the Recommended Buy feature may be used more responsibly.

Welcome as these changes may be, there are some other developments that I would be more interested to see in the future. I'll discuss that in a future post.