Here’s an interesting one. Cloud Shell gives you a command line “shell-like” interface to popular web services such as Del.icio.us, Twitter, Facebook, and 30 boxes. You can set up scheduled commands, send command output to email, or even pipe the output of one command into another. The Could Shell command line is provided through a web or IM interface, and soon by mobile phone.
The service is clearly targeted toward techies who are used to living on the command line.
The number of commands you can issue each month is limited to 300 in the free version, but an unlimited version is $9/month.
Right now, only 4 or 5 services are integrated, so what you can do with Could Shell is very limited. Maybe if the company opened up an API to third party developers so that they could integrate their own sites and services into the command line, that would be a great first step. By opening up an API, the number of services could begin to proliferate quickly, assuming there are enough people who want to access web services via the command line. Those companies that integrate to such an API could help to promote it to their users, giving Cloud Shell increased distribution.
I also think it would be interesting to focus on delivering highly usable endpoints for the service. For example, the command line interface could be accessed via Twitter, IM, email, the web, SMS, and more. I could imagine piping results from a Facebook query into Twitter in order to tweet a current result set, for example.
I don’t have the patience for something like this myself. Maybe some of you command line junkies want to give it a spin and give them some feedback. I’m sure they’d love it.
