Charles Hudson's Weblog

I was not particularly impressed with the first iteration of Path. I just couldn’t relate to the need to restrict photo sharing to a limited number of people. So I’ve been surprised how much I like Path 2.0. I written before about how my own social network usage is changing ( you can read those [...]

Awhile back I posted a question on Quora about services looking to disrupt Yelp via focusing on short-form reviews. I got a lot of feedback via email, Twitter, and Facebook and one person in particular, David Levy, pointed out that foursquare is the most likely competitor. All that was lacking was a better logged out [...]

I’ve been thinking a bit about how I use social networks and how it continues to evolve. Increasingly, I find myself wanting to consume Facebook’s myriad set of products and services as discrete applications, especially on mobile devices. The core Facebook UI is burdened with having to do a lot. It has to be able [...]

I’ve been really curious about TaskRabbit ever since I heard about the service. While it has always sounded interesting in practice, I’ve struggled to find a good personal use case for the service. Like a lot of people, I’m busy and have a lot to do. But the idea of trusting tasks I need to [...]

I’ve been tracking the progress of Google’s In-App Purchases for awhile. It’s not just academic to me – we’re building Android games over at Bionic Panda Games and the development of that product is pretty important to us. Previously, I worked on the Facebook Platform, which went through its own process in launching Facebook Credits. [...]

I spend a large chunk of my day on my phone and away from my computer, running to and from meetings or pacing around the office. I also travel a lot, so I try to make sure I have a set of mobile communications tools I can use to stay on top of everything. Aside [...]

I’ve been chatting with a lot of people who are working on mobile games with a strong location component. Almost all of them are trying to do some mashup of a game plus check-in data to do something interesting. At its core, the concept sounds intriguing. To date, I don’t think anyone has really cracked [...]

Just a quick thought that’s been on my mind of late. I’m trying to figure out how two major changes I see in social and mobile games will be reconciled: 1. Many social games developers are gradually beginning to embrace deeper integrations of Facebook Credits into their on-Facebook social games. In a number of cases, [...]

In an earlier blog post, I speculated a bit about what Facebook Places might ultimately mean for foursquare. It’s clear to me that Facebook is putting a lot of attention on its Places product, both in terms of the product itself and the business relationship between places and national and local merchants. They seem to [...]

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should preface this post by noting that a friend and I tried to build a jobs-related product on top of the Facebook platform fairly recently and ultimately decided not to pursue it. In the process, we learned a few things that I think are worth consideration for anyone [...]