Introducing: Micro-Expression.

Can humans really communicate a word at a time?

Next week the public beta for my app launches. It’s my first app, but not my first foray in social media innovation. It’s a bold idea: One-word messaging and publishing.

Yup, on Babl you’ll have just one word to communicate, be it with one person, multiple people or all of your friends at once. The character limit is going to end up being somewhere between 15 and 20 characters (depending on feedback in the beta test), but beyond that very tight restriction, users are free to use any character they want to, except a space. Numbers are in, special characters are in, and so is the entire alphabet.

A Babl could be plain gibberish, an Oxford Dictionary-approved word, or multiple small words merged into one (a sort of hybrid text speak with fewer characters and no spaces I guess).

I’m not here on Medium to plug my app. Plenty of people use this space for that. No, I want to express an idea, or maybe pose a question. The question is: can we communicate effectively just one word at a time? The idea is: perhaps we can, and we should give it a try. Here’s why.

Humans — like many animals — communicate in a variety of forms. We’ve evolved to complex language communication, unlike any other animal, but we also communicate with body language, touch, and even smell & hormone. Language-based communication comes in a variety of forms too. If you spend any time listening to people speak different languages, compare, say English and Vietnamese, and you’ll see that verbal communication is a highly varied medium.

There is long-form verbal communication — speeches and long conversations with long sentences and reems of spoken word. Then on other occasions a conversation can be a staccato affair, where just a few words are exchanged, but an important message is broadcast and acknowledged. You can tell someone how you feel in just a few words; equally you can plan an informal meeting without spending ages explaining yourself.

This is the principle behind what from now on I’m gonna call ‘micro-expression’. We’ve seen huge innovation in communication technology thanks to the advent of mass broadband, the smartphone, and then the tablet computer. We now communicate with friends or family or strangers — who could be located anywhere — in the blink of an eye, using things like SMS, and apps like Whatsapp. Younger people have embraced radically innovative tools like Snapchat, enabling casual, disposable communication at the speed of light.

We’re all pretty much used to 140-character discussion on Twitter. We’ve all posted a Facebook status. We all send text messages, either through SMS, or Whatsapp or some other messaging app. Communication — digital at least — has been boiled down to short-form, rapid-fire communication, and I believe this is good for us. It speeds up social interaction, and it certainly speeds up business.

One-word communication is the next logical step.

People might balk at the idea now, but think about it. There are millions of things you can say with 15 characters. Especially when you can add a small photo to the message. It can increase intimacy between two people, it can be used to broadcast something to a wide group of people. It can be used to play things, to notify people of updates on your location en route to a meeting. It can just be a fun word association game. The possibilities are endless.

If two humans can communicate vast amounts with just one look of the eye, believe me, one-word communication has legs.

Babl launches in public beta on Android on Monday, and will be available on iOS, Blackberry 7, and Windows Phone by the end of January.