"You have to bring some funk to get some. You just can't walk in a place and expect to get some funk. If you ain't bring no funk, then you can't get no funk... Another thing is, you can't fake the funk or your nose will grow."

-- Bootsy Collins, quoted by Seth Godin

A lot of people have referred to Google Talk as "open source," but the source isn't open; it just happens to be using an open protocol called Jabber -- similar to how web browsers like Internet Explorer use open protocols called HTTP and HTML.

Google's supporters make a big deal about how you can use non-Google Jabber clients to connect to Google Talk, but somebody using a non-Google Jabber client doesn't benefit Google at all, so eventually they'll start adding new features...and those new features won't immediately work on other Jabber clients, even if Google publishes the standard...which brings us back to the early days of the browser wars, where Netscape would add non-standard (or not-yet-standard) features that didn't work on Mosaic or Lynx.

The real question people should be asking is "will my teenaged sister switch to Google Talk?" I bet the answer is no, because all her friends are still on Yahoo, and she thinks the hidden piggy emoticon* is the cutest thing ever.

The sky begins to brighten behind the clouds, and as I stand here waiting for the bus I wonder what was here before the freeway cut my neighborhood in half. My apartment is on one side, with a nice view of 580...the bus stop is on the other side, on another one-way street going the other direction, with a cruddy view of the wall that hides whatever's underneath 580. Are old Oakland houses still there in some form? Would I even be here if it weren't for 580 cutting cleanly through?

The bus runs up Broadway, meandering towards the Macarthur BART station, and slowly, as it has done for hundreds of years, Oakland awakens.