I am a little worried

A few months ago I heard about something called Empire Avenue. At the time, and maybe even now, I didn't really know what the objective of the site/business was, though I did have the sense that it had something to do with social networking and advertising. What I did know was that the company/venture had strong ties to Newfoundland (as is indicated by its name - a street in St. John's).

While at first I was just aware of this operation's existence, I eventually checked out their website and even their blog. One of the most surprising things that I learned while on their website is that my former roommate, early Montifax reader, Rhodes scholar, and all around good guy Nithum is involved with the project on the research and analytics side of things. Obviously, this news made me somewhat more interested in the project (and hopeful for its eventual success).

As intrigued and pleased as I was to see Nithum's involvement I still limited my involvement with the site to a subscription to their blog. I completely ignored the chance to participate at the early beta testing phases.

Empire Avenue is now several months into the beta testing phase and has opened its doors to the public (meaning that membership is no longer as restricted as it was when they first opened). As a regular reader of their blog posts I was aware of this change, though for some time I seemingly did nothing with this information.

Yesterday, for some reason, though I really don't know what it is, I finally decided to sign up for an account. Much to my surprise, I soon learned that Neil already had an account, which he seems to have had for some number of months. Seems as though we both now engaging in a form of competitive social networking (which still seems a little strange to me).

I guess I should have mentioned this earlier, but Empire Avenue is basically like a stock market, but instead of buying stock in companies with real money users buy 'shares' of people or companies with the site's artificial currency. This, of course, is tied in with user's social networking content. Things like users' overall wealth and share price are then determined by the combination of a number of these factors. If you think of it like a game, which I guess is encouraged, then you might think of one possible goal being to achieve a high share price while another goal might be to amass wealth (which may eventually be exchangeable for real-world rewards/discounts)

Edit: So getting to the title of this post, the thing I am worried about is too much spending time on this site. Even though I have only been a member for about 24 hours I can see that it could be quite addictive, particularly when competing against a particular person or set of people. I guess the only good news is that I know that I won't have the patience to really throw myself into this as some might, though there are a number of dynamics that I really do like.