I posted this after being really inspired by the HN post about John Carmack's .plan file[1], and then doing some research to discover what exactly a .plan file is.
That is what I get in Chrome when I tab to autocomplete "n". At some point I must have typed in "news.ycombinator.org" out of curiosity, and Chrome decided to favor it.
While I've never seen anyone use .plan or .project files, the finger command is still widely used on MIT's network. In fact, MIT's user search (http://web.mit.edu/search.html) is just a front-end for the finger command.
It does raise some privacy concerns though, as you can see here: http://amap.mit.edu/
I feel like such an oldie reading things like this :-) Watching the younger generations rediscover things that I have lived through is making me gravely aware of my own mortality today. I'm expecting somebody to point out an article on Kermit next, or be astonished that once upon a time some people used email from a VAX vt100 terminal to access the public ftp server on nic.funet.fi :D
Also, there was something called "Faces" or "Picons" which were kind of a precursor to Gravatar which showed you images that corresponded to emails, domains, and more. Indiana University had a Web service for performing these lookups using finger[0] (looks like it has since been turned off). For example, here is Richard Stallman[1] and here is Dennis Ritchie (RIP)[2].
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] thread[1] http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3367230
It does raise some privacy concerns though, as you can see here: http://amap.mit.edu/
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172305/http://www.cs.indi...
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172449/http://www.cs.indi...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172341/http://www.cs.indi...