Charles Hudson’s Weblog

I was on a plane earlier today sitting next to someone with an iPhone. One of the things I’ve been wondering a lot lately is whether RIM made a mistake by not investing more research and energy in making a better web browsing experience for the last few versions of the Blackberry. Whenever I talk [...]

I was checking out tweetmeme today and I thought it was pretty clever. Twitter is its own community with its own dynamics, but I have lately been itching for a service that would help me get value out of the status updates that my friends are constantly posting. I just came back from a trip [...]

I have been talking to a number of folks I know who are spending a lot of their time building applications or services for the Facebook platform and I have been struggling to really understand the motivation. Then I read this great post on Andrew Chen’s blog about the difference between people who are motivated [...]

I’ve been really busy with work lately and I find that being busy really helps me focus on the best uses of my limited free time. Lately I’ve found myself spending a lot of time “hanging out” on Twitter and FriendFeed. The reason I like hanging out on both sites is very simple – they’re [...]

This is a shameless work-related plug. Our Facebook application, is now live on Facebook. It has been one of the top-rated applications on Bebo since launch and we’re now bringing it to the Facebook audience as well. It actually spans both networks, so you can have people from various networks (Bebo, Facebook, and others in [...]

A GSB classmate of mine and fellow ex-Googler of mine is one of the co-founders of Mogad, the team behind social.im. I’ve been playing with the tool a bit for the last week or so and it’s fun. Just some random thoughts about the whole space.

1. I have a lot of friends on Facebook [...]

I have 5 Xobni invites to give away. If you’d like one, just drop a comment. No need to leave your email address in plainview. I’ll email you back directly once your comment is approved.
UPDATED – I am all out of invites. If I get more, I will work my way down the [...]

One of my favorite work topics is the whole question about the role of the “best athlete” in small, growing companies. If you want a good summary of the “best athlete” debate, I’d recommend you check out this post on Dick Costolo’s blog – he sums it up well. The basic argument is about the [...]

I have been noodling on this whole idea of social shopping, which I think is still a poorly-defined concept. I have to warn you in advance that this is a fairly academic-style post.
What does it mean to “shop socially”?
To me, social shopping is about leveraging the collective wisdom of others, be they friends or [...]

I’ve been intrigued by Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed ever since I heard of both services. In the spirit of disclosure, I worked with one of the co-founders at FriendFeed when we were both at Google and I think he is a very bright guy. With that out of the way, I have to say that [...]