Are tweets the new .plan?

Back in the good old days, there was the .plan file. You could use the finger command to ping a server and it would return the contents of the .plan file. The awesome folks at id Software were big users of this service.

It was so very cool to get a behind the scenes peek at what was going on with a group of people making a top notch game. Other developers began doing this also, and soon there was a nice little ecosystem of plan updates flying around. This was all pre-RSS.

Over time the .plan file fad kinda fizzled out and died. But now with the rise of twitter, it seems like it could see a come back. True, 140 characters is not a lot of room to explain certain technical issues, but John Carmack’s tweets are a step in the right direction. I’m glad he’s back.