Charles Hudson's Weblog

This is more of an open thread than a blurb. I’ve been looking at the dismal data on venture capital exits and the growing swirl of rumors about Twitter getting acquired. One thing I’ve always wondered is whether a situation where a big company buys a small company for a large sum (say north of [...]

In the last few days I’ve talked to three people who’ve been debating setting up Facebook Fan Pages for some cause / group they like or support. They’ve also asked about Twitter. I saw this post about the pending re-launch of the Facebook Pages with a new-and-improved experience for brands. I’ve been using Twitter 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 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 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 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 [...]

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 [...]

After hearing about FriendFeed’s upcoming API, I’ve been thinking about the kinds of features and functionality I’d like to see enabled once the API is available. At the end of the day, I really like the conversations that happen on FriendFeed and I hope the upcoming API offers folks a way to share those conversations [...]

I was reading this article on TechCrunch “Facebook Targets FriendFeed; Opening Up The News Feed” and I found it kind of interesting. As someone who uses FriendFeed a lot and uses Facebook less and less, I don’t think the FriendFeed team should spend much time worrying about this announcement. The reason is really simple. In [...]

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 [...]