Charles Hudson’s Weblog

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’m fascinated [...]

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 [...]

Over the past few months, I’ve been really interested in developing a better understanding for how effective Facebook’s advertising tools are. I’ve done this strictly for my own events business, not for Serious Business. For a total expenditure of slightly over $1,000, I feel like I’ve come up with a few opinions / thoughts on [...]

I have been thinking a lot about whether Twitter will ultimately become as fertile a place for social games as Facebook has become over the past 18 months. I have to preface this article by saying that I am not actively involved in building games on the Twitter platform nor do I have any firsthand [...]

I’ve had Facebook on the brain lately – not surprising given that I work at a company that builds games for the Facebook platform. One of the more interesting things I’ve been trying to figure out is the use case for a “Pay with Facebook” or Facebook payments solution off the Facebook platform.
Changing the [...]

I saw a Google blog post about their new profiles product and thought it was interesting. I immediately went and created my profile and had some thoughts on why Google might want to release this product and what it means for the web more generally. Google spends a lot of time analyzing what people do [...]