In 1971, Mark Zuckerberg was negative 13 years old. The phrase "social network" would have returned awkward silences and weird stares, even amongst the savviest tech entrepreneurs. If you had said the word "Blog" people would have thought you were coughing something up. Yet, in their own weird little ways, thousands of people were social networking and blogging.
In my post Wednesday, I said:
We tend to live in our own little bubbles and think that somehow, our problems are brand new, and that they've never been solved before. Well, guess what: almost all of them have been solved before, have been solved better, and are included in almost all Unix systems out there.I've found that this maxim is almost universally applicable to movements in technology. I've there's some big new thing, it has probably been done before, and it has probably been done better, and it was probably included in Unix.
finger is to Friendster as Friendster is to Facebook
The finger Unix program was developed in 1971 by Les Earnest. It provided a way for you to figure out what other people were up to. You'd execute the command "finger user@domain" and you'd get all sorts of useful information back: The user's phone number, how long they've been idle, how long it's been since they've checked their mail, and the contents of their .project and .plan files. Here's what it looks like if you execute "finger erik@subwindow.com":
[subwindow.com]
Login: erik Name:
Directory: /home/erik Shell: /bin/bash
On since Sat Jul 5 14:11 (UTC) on pts/0 from c-98-242-74-4.hsd1.ga.comcast.net
3 minutes 9 seconds idle
No mail.
Project:
Current Projects:
-Super Secret project. Relates to http://subwindow.com/articles/14
-Rails plugin for managing approvals. Was called acts_as_approved, but I think I'm renaming it.
Projects in Stasis:
-Aloe: A long-term work in progress. Aloe (or "A-l=o.e": Assets - Liabilities = Owner's Equity) will
be an easy-to-use online accounting system. It is designed for the small business owner that does
not specifically have any skills in accounting. It is currently in pre-alpha. http://aloe-acct.com/
-Skribit: Formed as part of Startup Weekend Atlanta, I'm an ongoing contributor to this social suggestion
engine for bloggers. Contributions are erratic, based on the activity of those in the "Current Projects"
section. Others are more active than me, so the entire project is not in stasis, mind you.
Projects in Maintenance:
-Forecaster.ws A simple and uncluttered weather information service, tailored specifically for mobile
devices. Currently in late public beta.
-PropertyBuilder A proposed alternative to Object#andand and the ilk. Available through the
'gem install propertybuilder' command.
-Zsff A parser/validator for the ZSFF feed format. Version 1.0 released as a gem and is available on
Rubyforge or through the 'gem install zsff' command
-Rhobbler A Last.fm / AudioScrobbler track submission tool for Rhapsody. Currently in public beta.
Plan:
Today, I'm going to have a 4th of July party/Kelly's Birtday party. But it's on the 5th. Because even parties
can be fashionably late.
This week: Super-secret project continues. On Tuesday I hope to release my approval Rails plugin.
Hmm. That looks awfully similar to some other services I use heavily. It's pretty much the amalgamation of my Facebook page, my blog, and my tweets. And this was available in 1971!
The Trouble With finger
You may be wondering "If finger was so great, how come I've never heard of it, and how come we aren't using it now?" Well, finger had a lot of problems, unfortunately. Here's my understanding of what caused the downfall of finger (Also note that I was negative 12 years old when finger was invented, and about 10 when most people stopped using it):
- It depended on a doomed computing style. The only way finger really made sense was if everyone at an organization regularly logged into the same physical Unix machine. This made a ton of sense in the mainframe era, but finger's popularity was directly proportional to the popularity of the mainframe.
- There were no privacy protections. finger was notorious for being used as a tool for crackers and other nefarious characters to gain information. If you fingered the root of a domain (ie: 'finger @gatech.edu'), you'd get a listing of every user in the system- their phone numbers, and what they were up to. This information is kind of sensitive to just be putting out into the ether. Subsequently, fingering was seen has kind of a rude thing to do to someone unless you knew them and had a justification for seeing what they were up to. This didn't sit well with lots of people and contributed greatly to its demise. finger had no privacy features like Facebook now has. If it did (ie: Here's who my friends/coworkers are, let them see this information. Only display this subset to other users), I think it might still be in heavy use today.
- finger was a protocol, and not a platform. There was no party responsible for carrying it forward or for providing necessary upgrades. When Facebook users complained about too much information being available to the public, they instituted incredibly granular privacy controls. When finger users complained about the exact same thing, there was either nobody to complain to, or they said "Well, turn it off." So they did.
Lessons are for Hares
Of course, there's some valuable lessons to be learned here. The main one is that you should always make more of an effort to see what's been done before you. The makers of Facebook shouldn't have just learned about Friendster, but they should have made more of an effort to learn about the earlier ancestors of social networking. If they had looked for and learned about the reasons for finger's demise, they might have avoided about half of the major confrontations that they've had with their users. With a full understanding of history, you can better realize that you are not a unique butterfly, and that your idea is not really that new. You can better gain perspective and learn the lessons of your forebears. This is something that's not unique to technology. You should apply this maxim everywhere in life- especially politics.