hans.gerwitz

Back in the day, we used to leave a small file named .plan in our Unix home direc­tories, which others could read over port 79 with the finger command. It was a useful for quick status updates, to find out what people were working on (or where they were off to) without pestering them. John Carmack popu­larized it as a proto-​​blog, and the IM phenomenon brought a similar function main­stream via presence noti­fi­cation with custom status messages. But I’ve been frus­trated at how difficult it is to log and broadcast a group’s or even my own status messages.

Enter Twitter, basi­cally an imple­men­tation of finger using the contem­porary infra­structure of HTML and RSS over HTTP, with IM and SMS tie-​​ins. Now I have a .plan again. Maybe someday Ambient Devices will build me an LED sign to display it in a more physical manner.