[rodw]

> Myspace -> FB

Some of you may be surprised how far back this chain goes. Back in the (pre-www) day we used the `finger` command and `.plan` / `.project` files as rudimentary versions of social profiles.

I'm not able to find anything that gives a decent sense of how these were used in practice but if you have no idea what I'm talking about there's an animated .plan demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMFzspwuQZw.

I've always assumed that the MySpace (and later, Facebook) verb "poke" was inspired by `finger` but I have no evidence for that.

[iamwil]

I used .plan in college. Email was provided by a telnet system, and you can update your own .plan account and see what your friends wrote by fingering their unix account.

It's kinda like how statuses were used in AIM/ICQ, or if tweets/fb messages only held the latest message. A good modern example are how people use twitter profile bylines. Something pithy and clever to show how cool and funny you are to your friends.

[adventured]

> I'm not able to find anything that gives a decent sense of how these were used in practice

Here you go, the id Software .plan reads on Blue's News. That's how a lot of people consumed id's .plan files back then (with id being one of the more famous publishers at the time). It's not pre-www, however it gives a pretty good sense (for those not exposed to them) of what .plan files were like to consume.

On the right side panel you can click through the emloyee names and then change the date with the "Archived Dates" select box above the names:

An example by Paul Jaquays:

https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=8

Brian Hook from 1999:

https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=7

John Cash from 2000 and 1998:

https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=9

https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=9&time=199811...

Paul Steed in 1998:

https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=2&time=199806...

And John Carmack's .plan archive from 1996 forward:

https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan/tree/master...

[fnord77]

"webrings" were primitive social networks, too

[rodw]

Were they though? In my experience webrings were more like rudimentary, off-white-to-gray-hat link-farms.

Were webrings ever used like a friend-list or is that not what you meant by "primitive social networks"?

[v64]

I can't give an exact year, but my memory from the mid 90s was that webrings were generally formed around themed content, like beanie baby webrings or coin collecting webrings, mostly run by individual fans/enthusiasts, and were used as a means for discovering others interested in the subject.

[rodw]

Ok. That's fair. That's basically the way I remember them too. I just see that more like a distributed "web directory" used for cross promotion than a social network, but I guess it kinda sits in between.

It was self-promotional but not in cynical or necessarily commercial way, kinda like social media before "influencer" became a job title.