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Ahhhhh memories. As far as I remember this didn't really spread beyond the PC game developer world. Back in the day we built an automated finger puller (poller) to grab all the game developers .plans and post them on PlanetQuake, etc (depending on which game they were working on). At the time it was considered a core feature for hot game news! Certainly the twitter of its' time for direct from the horse's mouth news.

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I was very into PC gaming during this era, and ran a decently sized gaming news website, and Carmacks use of .plan as a one-to-many microblog was really a decade or two ahead of what became mainstream twitter’s primary use case. None of the games I ‘covered’ had enough .plan activity by the developers to warrant an automated script, but I remember being really impressed by the sites that did it (usually id-centric ones like blues news or stomped I think?)

Such good memories. I think my whole career has been built around chasing the feeling I had when making that gaming site.

icculus [1] (who ported a bunch of games to linux), still uses finger [2]

  [1] https://icculus.org/~icculus/
  [2] https://icculus.org/finger/icculus

Fantastic! How lovely to read these stories. And what influences Id has had on Finger.

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