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’ve been very curious to read this weekend’s stream of people commenting on Twitter’s business model and what it will look like. I read this one in Forbes – it talks about how being able to use search and analytics might ultimately deliver a powerful business model for Twitter. I also read Eric Schonfeld’s TechCrunch [...]

I’ve had a few experiences in the past few weeks that continue to bolster my belief that monetizing social networks and communities will continue to be a lot harder than people think. 1. I posted a question on Twitter about the difference between two different sets of Bose headphones and got a lot of information [...]

I was re-reading the announcement about how Google Apps and Salesforce will be working together more closely to make Google Apps and Salesforce work together more closely. As someone who has used a number of CRM products over the years, I welcome this announcement. I continue to believe one of the big things that hampers [...]

I was one of the beta testers for the Dash Express GPS unit, a very cool GPS unit from Dash Navigation that includes a Wi-Fi radio, a GPRS radio, and all of the features you’ve come to know and love from modern GPS units. This is the first and only GPS unit I’ve ever owned [...]