Social sites like Twitter, Flickr, and Moblog are bringing basic command line instructions into mainstream use. Simple things like placing your image on a map, or easily addressing something to a friend or acquaintance is becoming commonplace.

This is remarkable I think. GUI’s are what everyone knows, a familiar way of entering metadata such as tags say. What Twitter has done with the @username command is bring the “command line” into general daily use across a non coder community.

You’ve been able to tag your images at Flickr using the simple - tags: tag1 “tag 2″ command for ages. Similarly at Moblog you’ve been able to do that for a long time. We’ve taken that one step further at Moblog for mapping using the same sort of syntax map=”street,city,country”. Because webmail/MMS messages often have advertising appended, you can add the simple: .unspam command after the text you actually want in your post.

Being able to communicate media, metadata, or directly with someone else on the same (or cross) network using simple commands is a Big Deal, and I think is going to be a big part of how average users interact with the sites they use over the next 24 months. The command line in this context doesn’t need to be complicated, using simple syntax you can do deep things on the network. Here’s an example:

——————

Task: I want to post a video to Moblog, Geolocate it, update my current location, Tag the video, remove any unwanted spam from the MMS/Email, and tell the user tarek on twitter that I’ve uploaded a video of him.

Subject: A video I shot of @tarek this weekend

Body:

This was over the weekend, was pretty funny, I had no idea you could balance *this* many cats on a persons head.

tags=”tag1,tag2,tarek”
map=”12 street,city,country”
mylocation=”45 street,city,country”

.unspam

——————

So the subject gets pinged to Twitter using the autoping function at my moblog along with a tiny url of the post. The commands in the body of the message perform all the tasks I wanted to achieve using a simple and familiar ‘human’ syntax.

Now if my moblog is also linked to my fireeagle account, I’ve also updated my location (based on privacy settings) to all of the other sites I’ve authorised to access that (Dopplr, facebook etc) information in about 30 seconds of typing on my phone.

That again, is remarkable. We’ve taken deep network instructions and made them intuitive (by this I mean familiar) to an average user. What is also remarkable is that we’re talking here about a great number of sites all linked by API. Startups and social sites are all talking to each other more than ever before, accomplishing much more for the user at the point of publishing.

You can take this simple syntax approach and extrapolate it out to accomplish any number of tasks in a way which people find familiar and easy to grasp, increasing the value of the network to the user and the users interaction with your network. Let’s say you’re commenting on a photo you see somewhere that looks just like a friend of yours, but you don’t know if it is. Being able to enter @friendsmembername into the body of the message to call them to that conversation from elsewhere within that network cuts out all the ‘is she on IM, Ill drop her an email/send her a message’ clutter and let’s the network do all the heavy lifting. There are inter-network issues there, but if the network is smart enough and is coupled via API to other sites you can add specific commands like @site=facebook+myfriend to call the person wherever they are.

Every site which aims to make interactions easier and more rewarding for it’s users should write a taxonomy of commands for it’s members; the command line is now mainstream, and it’s going to stay that way.

EDIT - if you’re site supports user commands, please leave a link to your site and list of commands in the comments section