Charles Hudson’s Weblog

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last Thursday I had the privilege of hanging out with some really famous bloggers and FriendFeed personalities including Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, Eric Eldon, Thomas Hawke, Louis Gray, Hutch Carpenter and the FriendFeed team (among many others) to get a good look at the new FriendFeed UI. If you want a more detailed treatment of [...]

This is more of an open thread than a blurb. I’ve been looking at the dismal data on venture capital exits and the growing swirl of rumors about Twitter getting acquired. One thing I’ve always wondered is whether a situation where a big company buys a small company for a large sum (say north of [...]