Charles Hudson's Weblog

This will be a very short blog post. I’ve had Google Wave for about two weeks now and I still can’t identify the core use case the product is seeking to address. I don’t have generic collaboration needs – I have plenty of specific situations where collaboration is helpful, but they’re all fairly custom. For [...]

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 would not describe myself as a power user of Twitter by any means, but I continue to be fascinated by the amount of energy and time people spend building tools on top of it and generally commenting on how it’s the next next new thing (double nexts were intentional). I do, though, use FriendFeed [...]

When I read Walt Mossberg’s revised review of MobileMe, I was really excited – it sounded like they had fixed many of the issues that had prevented me from using the product in the past. Alas, after two weeks of playing with MobileMe, I’m throwing in the towel. It’s not a bad product, it’s just [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been playing with my new Google Voice account now that my upgrade from GrandCentral is complete and so far I like it – it’s a good product and the improvements are great. I also like that the interface looks and feels more like Gmail and less like a webmail 1.0 interface. I’ve been a [...]

I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, but this one caught my eye: Gates to Google: “Your business applications stink” | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET Blogs (Disclaimer – I’m a former Googler and have been using Google products for productivity and personal [...]

I’ve been following this kerfuffle over the security and privacy “mishap” over Google Reader’s shared items feed and their second attempt at rolling out some truly “passively social” features and functions and allowing you to see the items shared by other folks who are in your Gmail contacts. I find it hard to argue that [...]

I was reading the official Google Blog about their upcoming “knol” product launch – “Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge” yesterday. After reading this post, it sounds a lot like FUD to me. I’ve never really accused Google of FUD-slinging before, but this sounds like a pre-announcement of a product that still has [...]

I’ve been waiting for Google Reader to roll out the feed recommendation service that just popped into my feed reader yesterday. I think this service will actually be far more useful for people who consume a ton of feeds than it will for those who are casual feed readers. This assertion isn’t based on any [...]