Charles Hudson’s Weblog

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 [...]

Just some short thoughts on the prospect of a Yahoo + Microsoft merger, if it happens:
We won’t see any real results from this integration until early 2010 – That’s the best case scenario. Assuming the deal closes in mid 2008, it will take another 6-12 months to figure out reporting structures, organization, merge product plans, [...]

I was checking out tweetmeme today and I thought it was pretty clever. Twitter is its own community with its own dynamics, but I have lately been itching for a service that would help me get value out of the status updates that my friends are constantly posting. I just came back from a trip [...]

I was able to attend the first half of the MIT/Stanford VLAB’s event on Web 3.0 and it was a good overview, in my opinion. I wasn’t able to stay for the entire thing, but here are a few thoughts and observations I had during my time at the event.
Market-driven innovation as a pre-cursor to [...]

Update – A few readers pointed out that the Alexa stats for some of the sites here look a lot stronger if you take a U.S. rank as opposed to a global rank. This is especially true for Trulia, Yelp, Kayak, and Indeed. It’s a point worth noting.
I have been doing a lot of thinking [...]

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about Q&A systems lately, largely because I think it’s an opportunity that’s becoming interesting again. In thinking about what can be done to improve the quality of Q&A systems, it appears to me that all of the systems out there (perhaps with the exception of Yahoo!) [...]

For the past week I have been talking with a bunch of people about vertical search business models. I have a pretty bipolar perspective on vertical search; some days I think there is a business there and some days I don’t. After many enlightening conversations, my general thoughts can be summed up in the following [...]