I looooooooove Fin Funnels. I couldn’t imagine my Gundam without them.
In the Gundam universe, Fin Funnels are known as one of the most uncanny weapons made for the experienced Newtype. Through the Newtype’s psychic powers, they destroy enemies with almost dead-on accuracy. They also last longer than conventional funnels because of their built-in energy generators. Finally, Fin Funnels have a feature not found in any other Newtype weaponry: They form a “guard” that protects the Mobile Suit from incoming fire, be it solid ammunition or energy beams.
So what is “Fin Funneling”, and how does it diversify the otaku blogger?
Fin Funneling is a term I would like to coin for relying on more than one medium of creative output. The blogger and the blog are the “Mobile Suit”, while the social interaction programs and sites that he or she uses aside from the blog are the “Fin Funnels”. The Fin Funnels work similar to their Real Robot weaponry counterparts by “firing” bits of the blogger’s information on his or her “targets”, i.e. the audience he or she caters in. They also “guard” bloggers from posts that they probably don’t want to post on their blog, or unwanted trackbacks and response posts that might spoil their blogging experience. No need for long tl;dr posts on some topic that doesn’t need stressing. All you have to do is open Twitter, and let them know what’s what in just 150 alphanumeric characters. Want to share something good without having to do shameless plug posts? Google Reader, link all relevant posts, and leave notes about the topic. How about your anime watchlist? There’s MyAnimeList. Online interaction in real time? GTalk, Google Wave, YM, MIRC, the usual talky-talky stuff that’s always available. There’s always an option to let everyone know what you do or what you have, and it never stops.
Now, now, Shance dear. Why the elitist facade? You use those sites and programs, too. That means you do Fin Funneling like the rest of us! So why are you trying to belittle their usefulness?
I’m not really belittling their usefulness here. I’m just saying, why use them? There’s the blog, you’re the blogger, and the blog is all you need if you want something expressed. So why? Is it because of the need to simply let anyone know? Is it selective posting, where you say what’s awesome, but pick which ones you want to post on the blog while the rest gets posted as scrobble-tweets and GRSI notes? Or maybe we just want to surprise the audience by supplying vague information about an awesome topic and letting them click the link for them to see for themselves. These things are taking the blogger’s attention away from the blog, which I think is bad. On the other hand, it helps maintain activity by letting people know what the blogger’s doing, which is good.
Maybe it’s just me here, but hey, blogs are the reason why we call ourselves bloggers. Let’s live up to our names, our mobile suits, and our status, shall we?
Further Reading
It was actually talked about before…:
Don’t Rely on Twitter – aloe, dream
The difference between firing your mobile suit’s Beam Rifle and Fin Funneling:
I like to keep those tiny things I can’t make into a post as Fin Funnels. If something comes up then I could fire them in my Beam Rifle. And sometimes I just use them to talk to people?
Oh and lol jargon
I ruled out the talking/chatting part. Well, if you mean it as not being a part of a blogger’s activity, then I guess it’s okay? We can’t always use GTalk and chat about something that’s always blogger stuff. Then again, I’m being specific about the blogger (otaku blogger, that’s why I put it on the title), so talking about anime or manga or games may be considered as blogger talk.
That’s just me, though.
I hardly chat with animebloggers about blog related stuff lol.
It’s a matter of preference, then? It’s kind of hard to categorize when it comes to mixed content. Whether or not it applies to what I’m saying is up to you as a blogger, regardless of genre.
Ultimate fusion is something more complex+organized+categorized than twitter, hopefully open, positively real-time, but still allows “sharing” with followers. The blog is one of those shared sources, reader shares are one of those sources, scrobbling is one of those sources… and you know what, it shouldn’t matter what the source platform is being used (be it WordPress, Google Reader, twitter, etc).
Google’s Buzz thing, while facing many adversaries, at the core is precisely this concept. Make connections (social relations, friend-follow, etc) at a higher level than the social network and then enable sharing/updating of items generated anywhere using completely open standards (Atom, PuSH, WebFinger, Salmon).
Also, I wish XMPP (Google Talk) anibloggers would do more group chats, that would be fun…. just invite everyone and their friends and their friend’s friends…
I actually have mixed feelings with Buzz because of getting influenced by the other anibloggers. It has a plethora of services to offer: Tweeting, sharing of reader items and blog posts, and updates on Wave and even GTalk. Versatile, all right, but is it even private or secure? Are the security settings solid enough to hide your personal information (in this case, your Google Profile)? A lot of bloggers I know use their email for purposes other than blogging, and sharing that information is kind of hard unless they’re sure on how it’s going to work. These are the questions I mostly hear from them.
I’m not touching Buzz yet, but convince me well enough, and I will.
Oh, and I’m free for GTalk anytime, if you want chat. Inviting others will have to be the next priority if we want group chats to pull through (which is usually the hard part).
The influence of other anibloggers, from what I’ve seen, is that they feel their well-established social ecosystems (twitter/facebook) are threatened with this new concept (which isn’t exactly true… buzz just connects things so that not everyone needs to be on the same social platforms). Frankly, I’m not sure many want things to change, and to many it’s still 2009, the year you weren’t an aniblogger unless you had a twitter or reader account (sadly, that’s an illusion, a dependency).
What isn’t an illusion is the necessity of this micro-communication, and Buzz is simply another take on that. But what makes it micro? What defines twitter? IMO, isn’t not that messages are small, but that things happen fast, it’s real-time*. The problem with calling it “micro” because it’s small is that a finite definition of small/short is subjective. One person might think 100 characters is micro, while another might say 500; the future should have no limit, and users will still tend to make short statements.
Are the security settings solid enough to hide your personal information
This is why users should think about what email they are using for what purposes. Ultimately, email is the identity in many of these online services, and if a service was ever compromised, activity can be linked to email. The email used for a service should reflect the intended identity; to the extreme: people don’t subscribe to porn sites using their work email unless they are idiots. Moral of the story: if you want to hide your personal email identity, do not use it when signing up for sites you would not want linked to your personal identity.
I don’t ever use my “named” email when signing up for sites, though I don’t mind giving it out if someone “really” wants to email/chat me at that address; I’m not hiding it.
Buzz has a number of group/privacy settings though, so if users wanted to, they could feed from two separate sites (e.g. twitter) to two separate groups of users that follow them.
Buzz is good (heard it’s much better on iPhone/Android), OStatus is really good, they converge. If this micro-communication is to succeed, it should be established as something across the entire internet like email, irc, or xmpp (chat-im), rather than being locked up in one or two social services. So, I’m all for platforms which push micro-communication towards something Internet-wide, and non-domain specific.
*Another illusion that real-time can only happen on these social platforms. rsscloud was built into RSS nearly a decade ago.
ps. altaokami at gmail.com is my chat
Haven’t been on much lately because I’m in the mountains, but add me up and feel free to chat or start a group chat, that’d be fun 
Defining real-time nowadays seemed to be in order for our current trend. You can’t even call it micro-communication anymore since some of us pump out content at such amazing speed (team blogs, and some adrenaline-enriched guys like Digiboy), and that’s more than what Twitter can handle. The only instance Twitter is good is that it sets a limit, therefore making it abusable in terms of micro-communication, specifically in mobile web (for those who don’t have that much cash for cellphone stuff, but can’t help on updating themselves often). That, or it was trying to establish a territory of its own, which Wave and other Google apps have proved obsolete.
Speaking of Wave, with Buzz going around, don’t you think it was a wrong call? Buzz is almost doing what every Google app can do in Gmail (GRSI, Twitter, Email, GChat, what else?), and Wave is like, just there…
I’m not really going to elaborate any further on privacy and email, since you got it down pat. Kudos to me and you on that.
Wave has a misunderstood purpose I believe, which is real-time collaboration without provider restrictions; Wave federation enables any domain/site to have their own wave server, which still allows collab/connection between any other wave user on any other network/domain. (That’s precisely the core concept of federation though).
Now what I’m finding really good for this collab stuff is Google Docs, but that platform is locked to Google, while Wave is something which doesn’t need Google to work.
About content generation, yes, it’s massive, and I don’t think many realize how to make Buzz grab stuff from the blog in real-time. I’ve hooked my blogs to Buzz so that within a second after I make a post, it hits Buzz, and that’s precisely what the platform is built for (I’m using the pubsubhubbub plugin).
As for twitter, it’s running on the fuel of popularity and available interfaces, like mobile/sms access, which I don’t find very useful even with unlimited sms works (it’s about multi-media, and I can email anything to Buzz). It’s also not true real-time, as all apps are using polling to check for new updates. This is totally different from Status.net or Ostatus which is built on an XMPP backbone (the stuff which makes GTalk work), so it’s truly real-time “chat.” … I would really like to see anibloggers push to using some XMPP service, whether it’s GTalk, their own XMPP server, or Status.net. A mass chat where everyone is on the level, but it’s not centralized in any one place… which is why I suggested the gtalk multi-chat
Buzz is a good place to put attention because it allows the user to see a lot more in one place, and I like that aspect. I check email, I sit on IM, so why should I need to pay attention to 6-7 other social spheres when I can aggregate them in Buzz. Higher level social relations. It’s good that way, turns the entire Internet into a social network rather than a few closed silos. People will resist it, but the individual being his/her own social network is the future, just like they can be their own blog. Nobody is stuck to blog at wordpress.com, blogger, livejournal, xanga… we can blog wherever we want, and that’s the same degree of freedom which we should have with social networking.
So that’s the gist. Real-time, social “blogging” and communication without platform restrictions.
Occasionally I’m tempted to get a Twitter account, or to be more active on Google Reader. But you know, despite the fun to be had, I’m hesitant to bring myself out on that level. I’m afraid I’ll lose some of my blogging mojo if get that kind of instant feedback on what I’m watching or thinking.
Attention is the commodity. Paying yourself by putting the energy into your blog is a sound idea, and I often smack myself for idling away in IRC when I could be thinking about writing. The downside to services external to the blog is that they consume attention, and with regards to twitter [lesser extent google reader], there is a crap load of content generated, but imo it’s de-valued when one has to read back through 500 updates that were generally random and unfocused. At least with Reader (and Buzz) the conversations have better organization and more focus (not always more valuable, but sometimes). I don’t feel bad about “following” twitter, tumblr, or status.net/OStatus users with feeds.
Buzz actually does not intend to disrupt your attention (with the thought that users already pay attention to their inbox), it is an integrating platform (social aggregator based on email identity) as opposed to a generating service (blog, photostream, or any other social profile). It does consume time, but I don’t feel it’s the type of platform to “suck in the user and lock them there.”
Either way, the protocol blend that Buzz uses is something big. Check here.