When someone brings up social gaming, a few things may pop into your head: Angry Birds, Mafia Wars, Farmville…

What if social gaming wasn’t all about beating levels, planting crops or killing bosses? What if the players were real and their actions drove your success or failure? If that were ever the case, the social game you come up with might be called Empire Avenue.

Empire Avenue is a social game where you can buy stock in real people whose values rise and fall depending on their interaction. Think Klout meets SimCity.

Buy virtual shares in your favorite people on Empire Avenue.

While the idea of buying ownership in people originally gave me pause, I noticed that a TON of people were absolutely raving about Empire Avenue, so I decided to dig in and set up an account for myself.

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Have you used Klout? Can it really tell you how influential people are online? Can it be gamed? Read my review and decide for yourself.

What Is Klout?

Klout calls itself the “measurement for your overall online influence,” but what are they really trying to do? To understand Klout’s goal, you have to understand influence itself and the difficulty in measuring social media ROI. In the beginning, social media was measured in followers and fans, and for a time, life was good.

But with companies joining social media sites by the tens of thousands, everyone got followed and eventually tricks, software and spam accounts ran wild. Newcomers were able to create large ‘followings’ and social media service clients couldn’t tell who was legitimate, and who had purchased a great ‘friend adder’ software program.

If we can’t count on raw numbers to tell us who’s popular online, then what can we do? Enter Klout.

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If you’re not a huge fan of writing, it’s probably safe to say that you’ve considered speaking your content instead of organizing it into written words.

If that’s true, then you’ve probably heard of several podcast-type platforms, all the way up to the big dog in the industry, BlogTalkRadio.

Because demand is the main driver of more podcasts, platforms have evolved to add a number of social and practical features to entice would-be hosts to join their community. Today, we add a new face to that group with Spreaker.

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It sounds like a dating site when you read the tagline: “Zipcast is the way to meet online.”

But don’t be fooled—this new feature from SlideShare is more than just fake profiles and spambots (to be accurate, it’s zero parts fake profiles or spambots).

Zipcast wants to be the new way people hold meetings online, and it might have a shot.

Zipcast is so simple that this is the only picture of it… seriously.

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