Natural language searches didn't happen: "Don tells me that back in the 90s Natural Language Processing was all the rage. They were hoping customers would put in more words to get better results. In reality, though, that didn't happen. He said that 85% of all searches are one word."

I think we've seen the same with SMS. I used to rant about how keyword-based SMS services were an appalling user interface - and there was solid evidence to back me up. But as Robert pointed out to me a while back, as an industry I think we've trained people to understand the use of keywords with SMS.

We can see (from analysing messages we get to some of the services we run) that some folks still expect to be able to converse conversationally with text messages 5-digit shortcodes. But the incidence of this occurring is way down on a few years ago, and a combination of intelligent handling and interpretation of messages received, plus politely written pointers to the ones you don't understand helps put your customers onto the straight and narrow...

A few weirdies we see a lot of:

1. Users sending in words delimited using full-stops, not spaces
2. Users who send in their messages enclosed in apostrophes
3. Users who send in obscene jokes, or messages clearly intended for someone else
4. Obvious mis-spellings

All easily handled if you put some thought into it (and make an effort to learn from customer behaviour).