Charles Hudson's Weblog

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 [...]

I’ve seen a growing number of posts touting the enterprise as the next frontier for web 2.0. Heck, when I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in SF a few weeks back, the vast majority of the companies I saw listed as major sponsors for the event were those whose principal business was enterprise software. [...]

I’m way behind on blogging and here’s why: I wanted to give you a heads up on an exciting event coming up in June. I’m working with Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed and David Sachs to organize a one day conference on social gaming in San Francisco and I hope you can make it out for [...]

I’ve been fascinated by some of the large web 2.0 financings that have either gotten done (Slide) or are rumored to be on the table (RockYou, Meebo, etc). I am a bit perplexed about some of the grumblings about how start-up valuations are out of line with reality. I tend to disagree, but for different [...]

I’ve been running a small thought experiment in my head of late and figured I’d write it down. I’ve been wondering whether it makes sense for Facebook to start buying application developers who are building things for their platform. Initially, I felt the answer was a clear “no” but I’ve been moving toward a strong [...]

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 [...]

With all of the Yahoo and Microsoft blog commentary going around, I’ve been thinking a lot about M&A and whether the so-called “tuck-in” acquisition where a major Internet company purchases a smaller company for $25 to $100 million and rolls them into the larger fold. The logic for most of these deals is that the [...]

I’ll be speaking at the upcoming CommunityNext Conference on March 29, 2008 in lovely Hollywood, CA. If you’re going to be in LA that week, let me know as I should be in town for a few days. More on the conference below – thanks to the team for giving me the opportunity to participate! [...]

I’ve been working with the VLAB team to pull together what I think will be an excellent event on OpenSocial and why developers should consider a multi-platform strategy for their applications. More details below – you can register here if you want to go. Shaking the Money Tree of Multi-Platform Social Networks Why Pursue a [...]