Charles Hudson’s Weblog

Earlier this week I got my bit.ly pro account activated – I’m now sharing links at chudson.me. The nice thing about bit.ly pro is that it really reveals a lot about how powerful bit.ly really is as a service. After playing with the pro version of bit.ly, I’m really convinced that they’re on the verge [...]

I’m starting to see the “Sign in with Twitter” button in more places on the web. I’m still trying to figure out what the bigger picture plan is for this service. To me, it looks very similar to Facebook Connect – it’s a simplified way to log into 3rd party sites without having to create [...]

This has been a really interesting week in the world of platforms. Between Fred Wilson’s blog post on filling holes and the subsequent Tweetie acquisition announcement and Apple’s announcements about some of the social gaming features that will be part of the next iPhone OS release, it reminded me of some things I’ve thought about [...]

Something has been bugging me about social games of late. There are a lot of great games out there – I play a lot of them. And you know what many of them have in common? There isn’t enough chaos in most of today’s social games. Let me explain what I mean. I grew up [...]

I’ve been playing with Google Buzz for a few days, mostly to get a better sense for the interaction model. I’m a heavy Gmail user, so I’ve been particularly interested in how the service integrates with Gmail. While I have enjoyed using Buzz, it has helped crystalize some of my thoughts about why using email [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole idea of “Pay With Facebook” and the ability for people to eventually use their Facebook credentials to pay for things on and off Facebook. When I was at Google, I worked on Google Checkout for a year and have also been spending a lot of time studying [...]

I’ve been thinking about doing a 2010 predictions post for this year. In lieu of doing one, I thought I’d highlight the biggest platform battles that I find interesting in the upcoming year: Facebook vs Application Developers I (obviously) have a vested interest in how this plays out given my work with Serious Business. Nonetheless, [...]

I use Facebook a lot (I do work at a company building games on the Facebook platform, after all). I also use LinkedIn a lot as well. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between the two services. This is not a “will Facebook kill LinkedIn” type of post – I don’t think [...]

I was reading TechCrunch’s article on Zynga’s launch of Farmville.com earlier today. I’ve seen a lot of speculation about why Zynga might do this and what it means for the industry. I don’t think it signals a major shift away from Facebook or social networks, but it is an interesting hedge (at best) or a [...]

I spend a lot of time on Facebook, for work and for fun. I also spend a lot of time playing with applications and other services that either live on Facebook or have a strong connection back to the service via Facebook Connect. Of late, I have noticed that there are a few services that [...]