3 ms·

And blogging is basically just a .plan file...

by paul 17y ago

alphazero 17y ago
Come on Paul. IM is hardly ancient geek history.
- lacker 17y ago
  IM and IRC are fundamentally different from twitter and friendfeed, because twitter and friendfeed have home pages with content. Deciding what goes on the home page is key functionality that wasn't in IM or IRC.
  - likpok 17y ago
    Some IM protocols allowed one to set up some info which is public and supposed to act as a bio. This content could be some form of HTML, which is more than anything twitter supports (i.e, it let you do the styling, much to the detriment of others).
- paul 17y ago
  My point is not that they are the same, but that details matter a lot, and that just because there are parallels between two things, it does not make them the same thing. My .plan example was not made up -- that was an actual criticism from the early days of blogging (according to Jason Shellen, who was part of Blogger).
  - alphazero 17y ago
    (Just read Jason's piece the other day, actually. You can't leave comments on a .plan ...) I agree that details matter a great deal. In any event, the comment specifically questioned the temporal aspects of the analogy. Wishing you success in your endeavors.
nostrademons 17y ago
FWIW, the Amherst internal blogging/social-network site is called "planWorld", and it quite literally grew out of .plan files. Around 1999, someone decided it would be a good idea to have them be readable over the web, and so they hacked up a PHP app to expose people's .plans on a web interface. Eventually it grew the ability to post, to check who's been viewing your plan, to style things, to send private messages, and to have group conversations, but the terminology is still "finger" and "plan" and "whois". Until recently, it was also possible to go the other way: you could finger jdtang05@note.amherst.edu and it would show you what I'd most recently posted through the web interface. But planWorld recently moved to a newer server which isn't running fingerd, so that functionality has disappeared.

And blogging is basically just a .plan file...

by paul 17y ago

And blogging is basically just a .plan file...

alphazero 17y ago

Come on Paul. IM is hardly ancient geek history.

lacker 17y ago
IM and IRC are fundamentally different from twitter and friendfeed, because twitter and friendfeed have home pages with content. Deciding what goes on the home page is key functionality that wasn't in IM or IRC.
- likpok 17y ago
  Some IM protocols allowed one to set up some info which is public and supposed to act as a bio. This content could be some form of HTML, which is more than anything twitter supports (i.e, it let you do the styling, much to the detriment of others).
paul 17y ago
My point is not that they are the same, but that details matter a lot, and that just because there are parallels between two things, it does not make them the same thing. My .plan example was not made up -- that was an actual criticism from the early days of blogging (according to Jason Shellen, who was part of Blogger).
- alphazero 17y ago
  (Just read Jason's piece the other day, actually. You can't leave comments on a .plan ...) I agree that details matter a great deal. In any event, the comment specifically questioned the temporal aspects of the analogy. Wishing you success in your endeavors.

nostrademons 17y ago

FWIW, the Amherst internal blogging/social-network site is called "planWorld", and it quite literally grew out of .plan files. Around 1999, someone decided it would be a good idea to have them be readable over the web, and so they hacked up a PHP app to expose people's .plans on a web interface. Eventually it grew the ability to post, to check who's been viewing your plan, to style things, to send private messages, and to have group conversations, but the terminology is still "finger" and "plan" and "whois". Until recently, it was also possible to go the other way: you could finger jdtang05@note.amherst.edu and it would show you what I'd most recently posted through the web interface. But planWorld recently moved to a newer server which isn't running fingerd, so that functionality has disappeared.