That's roughly how people used to use Unix .plan files, with finger being a convenient way to check out what someone else was up to.
Which reminds me of a story. At Google in the mid-2000s, we used a corporate version of Google Chat, embedded in Gmail, much as it is today. One key difference in the UI was that your status appeared as text right below your name in other people's contact lists. Your status could be active, idle, away, or any freeform text that you set it to. The status lines in the contacts list updated in real time (ordinary today but remarkable back then). So people figured out that they could have an odd kind of one-to-many chat conversation by frequently updating their statuses. Not everyone was in everyone else's contacts list, so it was actually one-to-who-knows-how-many. And people used it accordingly, as if they were shouting stuff in a large room -- "does anyone know what's for lunch today?" "I heard it's lasagna" "beef or vegetarian?" etc.
Anyway, Evan Williams worked at Google back then, and I assume he saw these ephemeral messages flickering across his screen, same as I did. I wonder whether that planted the seed for Twitter.
That's a neat story that highlights the hacker mindset and what's cool about this little Handshake hack. Sure, it seems useless in a way, who cares about sharing a few characters on a blockchain or finding out what's for lunch. But there's something novel in it that sparks ideas.
Which reminds me of a story. At Google in the mid-2000s, we used a corporate version of Google Chat, embedded in Gmail, much as it is today. One key difference in the UI was that your status appeared as text right below your name in other people's contact lists. Your status could be active, idle, away, or any freeform text that you set it to. The status lines in the contacts list updated in real time (ordinary today but remarkable back then). So people figured out that they could have an odd kind of one-to-many chat conversation by frequently updating their statuses. Not everyone was in everyone else's contacts list, so it was actually one-to-who-knows-how-many. And people used it accordingly, as if they were shouting stuff in a large room -- "does anyone know what's for lunch today?" "I heard it's lasagna" "beef or vegetarian?" etc.
Anyway, Evan Williams worked at Google back then, and I assume he saw these ephemeral messages flickering across his screen, same as I did. I wonder whether that planted the seed for Twitter.