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my former PayPal colleague Yishan Wong, now an ass-kicking, name-taking engineer at Facebook, lays the "Walled Garden" rebuttal smackdown on Kottke, Arrington, et al. you go, Yishan... you just go.
look for more news on the Facebook front coming in a few weeks at the 2008 Facebook F8 conference in SF on July 23rd (register before July 7 to save some bucks). rumor has it Dave Morin will be debuting Facebook Friend (oops) Connect at the event. no word on whether Mr. Morin will be ripping any big air on stage, but we know he has the cojones if needed.
i'd also bet even money F8 will featured the long-awaited debut of Facebook Payments, whereby Facebook will finally begin addressing the monetization issue that has been dogging them for the past half-year. (btw, interesting listserve here apparently run by Jared Morgenstern... hi Jared ;)
happy 4th of July to everyone, and enjoy the long weekend... second half of 2008 begins Monday. gonna be a very interesting summer, i think.
update #1: Doh! guess Yishan's post is only visible to his facebook friends... okay, so maybe semi-permeable garden, perhaps. for the record, Yishan notes in the comments this is likely a bug, not intentional. might want to fix that.
update #2: so Kottke obviously came across this [now a bit ironic] post, and noted that it's also not viewable. to which, i was going to write a 'yeah, guess it seems a little silly' comment... except that Kottke's blog doesn't appear to accept comments (or am i missing something?) except on this property where nobody ever comments. tho his TOU seems to suggest he did previously, and earlier posts do have comments... if i'm clueless, maybe someone who knows the story there can fill me in. still, i wonder if people who live in semi-permeable blogs should throw stones at invisible smackdowns.
update #2b: thanks to Jon Bell who informed me that occasionally Kottke's posts are comment-enabled... but not that one.
update #3: no question, mr. kottke has a pretty damn huge audience. getting one of my larger traffic days ever from his off-day link to my piddly-ass little piece of shit i call a blog. holy crap.
More Startups. More Jobs.
kottke's just one guy, even if he is a proto-uber-blogger. He blogs on an open content platform called "teh internet" that you may have heard of. How does that make his decision to exclude comments from some post anything at all comparable to a closed-off non-indexed inaccessible, um, garden?
Posted by: xian | Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 11:42 AM
Maybe he just wants more friends.
It's kinda cute, really.
Posted by: devolute | Monday, July 07, 2008 at 01:22 PM
So if someone writes a smackdown and no one can read it, did anyone actually get smacked?
Posted by: Cruftbox | Monday, July 07, 2008 at 12:56 PM
I think you lost this particular debate, but ... there is no such thing as bad publicity. Take advantage of your "fifteen minutes of fame" and parlay it into something.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg | Monday, July 07, 2008 at 09:43 AM
I hereby nominate this entry for "Epic Fail of the Week".
Posted by: Too Ironic | Monday, July 07, 2008 at 07:20 AM
"Kottke's blog doesn't appear to accept comments"
Some posts do, because the posts warrant discussion. Others don't. But everyone can see his content, regardless of how he moderates comments.
I like Facebook fine, but I wouldn't start a fight between Facebook and a blog over who is more open and accessible.
Posted by: Jon Bell | Monday, July 07, 2008 at 07:12 AM
Ah, the irony, lovely stuff. Could Yishan please post his rebuttal outside of Facebook so the rest of us can read it? I'm sure he has some valid points or at least hints as to what is coming down the F8 tube.
Posted by: Paul M. Watson | Monday, July 07, 2008 at 04:42 AM
lol, kottke ftw, and other nerdy tech talk that drives the point that this was lame.
Posted by: Class-kicking lame-taking | Monday, July 07, 2008 at 02:02 AM
Obviously, Yishan, Facebook's "Everyone" is not *everyone*. Can I point out that in addition to your permissions being totally borked (according to the other commenters), it's completely inaccessible to those of us who don't *have* Facebook accounts.
(posted just in case the full scale of your monumental failure to lay down any smack wasn't yet apparent).
Of course, I could contact Yishan about this directly if only he had an open contact page on the web that had been updated sometime since 2000.
Posted by: Lachlan Hardy | Sunday, July 06, 2008 at 11:22 PM
http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/07/15989.html
Posted by: Gen Kanai | Sunday, July 06, 2008 at 10:51 PM
lame.
Posted by: john | Sunday, July 06, 2008 at 10:11 PM
so maybe someone can post this infamous note where the rest of us could read it?
Posted by: Scott | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 11:20 PM
Can't see it from where I sit (Tokyo), and I'm even friends with Dave on FB...
Posted by: Gen Kanai | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 05:13 PM
I suspect that "Everyone" might just mean "Everyone in Silicon Valley" and not just on Facebook. Let me check with the Notes guys...
Posted by: Yishan | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 04:20 PM
Dave, I will never forgive you for using that ridiculous picture of me with the parrots with this post.
Anyway, I set the note to be visible to "Everyone" but we have neglected our Notes application for long enough (you know, to possibly be working on all those products you speculate we may or may not be working on) that apparently it's not exposing that note to the world. Oh well - something to fix after F8.
Posted by: Yishan | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 03:43 PM
Hey Dave, your "'Walled Garden' rebuttal smackdown" link seems to take me to the Facebook sign in page. I happen to have an account, so I can sign in... but then I get "Sorry, you do not have permission to see this note." I don't have a horse in this race, but some folks might see that as a little ironic.
Posted by: Ken Sheppardson | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 11:16 AM
Sorry, you do not have permission to see this note.
Posted by: allen stern | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 11:15 AM