There are a lot of Twitter clones that are trying to figure out how to take the power of simple micro-blogging and bring it to the enterprise: Yammer, Present.ly, and WizeHive to name just a few.  They all share one feature that I find utterly fascinating: they all use a simple command line interface for the majority of their functionality.  Got a status update? Want to post a link?  Need to add an item to a to-do list?  All of those tasks can be accomplished by typing some keywords into the little command line box at the top of the screen.  Oh, and it all needs to fit into a 140 character window.

It’s clear that this was all inspired by Twitter and the 140 character limitation for status updates.  The ironic thing to me is that Twitter’s limitations weren’t about philosophy or trying to create a new way of doing things.  It was all about being able to send and receive updates over SMS, which have a strict limit of 160 characters per message.

Twitter’s real goal was probably not to be a ground-breaking new service that relied on a simple, extremely short command line for performing multiple actions and gestures.  It’s much more likely that their aim was to be compatible with updates from SMS text messages so that people could send updates, and also receive them as well without truncation.

Twitter’s intention is pretty clear: provide a simple status update service for the web that allowed you to broadcast your status to your friends.  This is evidenced by the fact that the update window today is still titled "What are you doing?" and not something more complex, like: "Add to the discussion" or "Share something with your friends."  That Twitter’s simple application has found other uses, and that people are building productivity tools based on the same concept, is a rather serendipitous discovery of the utility of being able to send SMS text message updates to the web.

The other aspect that I find intriguing is how useful this has proven to be.  There’s no flashy graphical interface, no extra buttons or complex forms.  And yet, it’s extremely flexible and useful, and people easily understand how it works.

It will be interesting to see how much further this goes.  If mobile devices improve their capabilities to interact with web applications, as they likely will over the coming years, it will be interesting to see if the "command line interface" of manipulating web applications continues, or ultimately gets replaced by flashier, more graphically driven applications.

As much as I enjoy being able to send updates to applications through SMS text messages, my gut tells me that "richer" mobile web interfaces are on the way, with more bells and whistles than we’ll know what to do with.  So enjoy it while it lasts.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Enterprise Web, Mobile Web, Social Computing