A major problem with the traditional finger program is that computing has changed since its design. When conceived, the number of computer systems was small, and the typical number of users on a system large. Today, we tend to have a large number of computer systems, mostly with a single user. To find out if a person is logged into one of a set of machines using the traditional finger program, all the machines in the set must be individually checked by a user.
GNU finger extends finger by supporting the concept of a "site". All computing systems in the site are continuously queried by a single server to build a composite listing of all users in the site. Any finger request received by a machine within the site is redirected to the central server. The interface allows three localities for specifying whom you want information about:
The presentation format is still limited to one of two, although the actual print formats are slightly different than traditional UNIX. A field which shows "which" machine at the site the user is logged into, as well as a "what" field showing the current program being run by the user were added. In addition, the server output is constantly filtered to only show one user login per machine.
Support for a still image (a face) for each user is almost provided by GNU finger. It has been supported in the past, and might be supported again in the future.
GNU finger is available by anonymous FTP from prep.ai.mit.edu, and is distributed by the Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139.