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 [...]

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 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. [...]

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, [...]

I’m knee-deep in last minute preparation for this week’s Social Gaming Summit. It should be great and I hope you’ll be there to join us. I was spending some time on AppData and was struck by something – I thought it warranted a quick blog post of my own. I was also inspired by something [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]