Charles Hudson’s Weblog

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 [...]

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 [...]

Something has been bugging me about social games of late. There are a lot of great games out there – I play a lot of them. And you know what many of them have in common? There isn’t enough chaos in most of today’s social games. Let me explain what I mean. I grew up [...]

I’ve been playing with Google Buzz for a few days, mostly to get a better sense for the interaction model. I’m a heavy Gmail user, so I’ve been particularly interested in how the service integrates with Gmail. While I have enjoyed using Buzz, it has helped crystalize some of my thoughts about why using email [...]

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 recently started using Tumblr about a week and a half ago on the recommendation of my friend, Hiten Shah. I have to admit, that I was really skeptical about whether I would need / enjoy / find use for another microblogging or content sharing service. I was also perplexed how Union Square Ventures could [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been playing with a lot of really interesting iPhone apps lately (mostly games) and one thing I’m finally beginning to see is a more concerted effort by iPhone application developers to start to think about viral distribution. As far as I can tell, the best two ways to get distribution for your app are [...]

I’ve now posed roughly 30 questions to Aardvark and I think it’s one of the more useful services I’ve used of late. In addition to being useful, I also think it has a reasonable shot at becoming an interesting business as well. In the interest of fair disclosure, it’s worth noting that Aardvark has good [...]