finger can be used as a sort of blog, icculus.org for example offers finger for all their users, and a web gateway.
He rewrote his daemon in perl though, you can find it
here.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the protocol, but some older implementations had some scary vulnerabilities.. most remaining daemons are run with reduced privileges (..privsep), so it's more of a stigma attached to it.. kinda like how many people still block ICMP packets, even though most network stacks have been audited since the 90's.
As for gopher, some live servers remain.. but AFAIK, Firefox was the last browser to remove support for the protocol.