Finger was the original Twitter. We used to get updates on Quake's development from John Carmack by fingering his email. He used to write elaborate ".plan" files too, no nonsense character limits were in sight yet. It was magical. It worked like this:

  $ finger johnc@idsoftware.com

I've tried the same now, 30 years after my last finger. It wasn't even installed on Ubuntu by default. I had to install it, and expectedly:

  $ finger johnc@idsoftware.com
  finger: connect: Connection timed out

Finger still exists at sdf.org