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Twitter needs a command-line

Friday, November 06, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Imagine a terminal program that accepted commands like: 

twitter> follow davewiner 

twitter> follow ev 

twitter> unfollow sexygirl209 

twitter> addtolist scoble halfmoonbay -u 

The first few commands are obvious, the last would add scoble to a list called halfmoonbay and unfollow him.  

I stumbled across this as I was thinking about how to implement follow and unfollow commands in listbrowser.org. Usually this would mean supporting OAuth, which is not a big deal, I already have the code, but it's a pain for users. Another site they have to trust. Even though OAuth is better than giving away my password, it's not much better.  

Then I thought how nice it is for a developer to just be able to shoot the text of a tweet over at the status box on Twitter, where the user is already logged-in. But that just works for tweets. What about follow and unfollow, and list operations? And a myriad of other chores that now you can do either interactively or through the API.  

Why not have something in the middle, more techy than the point and click interface, but easier than the API. We already have an idea how that works -- it's a command-line interface.  

To be clear, there are already command-line interfaces for Twitter, but they run on the desktop. We need a CLI that runs as a web app from a public server. It could come from Twitter, Inc, or could be done by a developer. If there's more than one, it would be nice if they used the same syntax.  

If you're already working on this, post a note in the comments or send me an email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com.