Charles Hudson’s Weblog

I saw so many posts about the new Google Nexus phone (I liked the one on TC, so I’m linking to that one) that I wanted to post my quick thoughts. In the interest of fair disclosure, I used to work at Google back in the day and know and respect a lot of the [...]

I was reading TechCrunch’s article on Zynga’s launch of Farmville.com earlier today. I’ve seen a lot of speculation about why Zynga might do this and what it means for the industry. I don’t think it signals a major shift away from Facebook or social networks, but it is an interesting hedge (at best) or a [...]

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 have to admit that the genesis for this post was a conversation I had with some of my business-minded friends during the first half of the Super Bowl. One of my friends, who runs his own venture-backed company, asked the group whether we thought the classic Silicon Valley, venture-funded tech startup scene was the [...]

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 the [...]

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. As [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]