Charles Hudson's Weblog

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 [...]

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to offer products that are free or basically free to users on the web. I try not to get religious about free – there’s nothing inherently right or wrong about choosing a business model that incorporates a free component so long as you understand [...]

I was reading Justin Smith’s good post on Faecbook’s delayed payment system and I thought I’d share a slightly longer version of what I left in the comments on his blog: I do think most of the major social networks have looked at payments and decided it’s a tricky business for them to tackle for [...]

Over the past week or so, a number of people have asked me if there is any good data that one could use to estimate the size of the virtual goods market in the United States for 2008. I haven’t seen too many published estimates that make sense to me, so I thought I would [...]

I was reading a post on AllThingsD about the Twitter+Facebook tie-up that wasn’t. I have been scratching my head since reading that post – it’s good reporting but I still can’t figure out why Facebook would want to buy Twitter. Twitter is building a very interesting community of users with very different norms from Facebook. [...]

I’ve been thinking a fair amount about what Facebook Connect might mean for social games developers, particularly those who are building games that reside primarily on social networks and leverage the social graph provided by Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and others. I’ve read a few articles of late, including this good one by Bret Terrill and [...]

A lot of times I read things that say that LinkedIn is a better business because they cater to professionals while Facebook focuses on personal relationships. I think that’s a really superficial way to look at what is, in fact, a much more nuanced difference. At the end of the day, my impression is that [...]

I’ve been fascinated by the blogosphere’s musings on Twitter’s downtime. I, for one, am relatively sympathetic toward their plight – there’s nothing tougher than trying to scale a system that’s growing quickly and has a very unpredictable, bursty traffic profile. And as much as I like and enjoy Twitter, it’s not a life-or-death kind of [...]