Twitter and SaaS

So I'm several months late to the game on twitter but I have finally setup an account.  What's the big deal?  I guess if I had a following this could be of interest, but honestly I'd rather use facebook to update my status than constantly update twitter and facebook.  These mobile social apps are getting ridiculous... there is obviously some niche to twitter I'm not appreciating yet.  I'm perplexed that twitter itself doesn't create blackberry apps, it seems rather that they've exposed an API for everyone else to build apps - so there's multiple solutions.  I definitely prefer the facebook approach to this.  I'm already disenchanted with my first download - twibble.  I'm uninstalling that from the blackberry until I get a better understanding of how to use this service. Since SMS updates are possible I don't see a reason to have a separate application.  Speaking of SMS updates, the gmail ability to SMS people is pretty sweet - however they have yet to grace my lowly account with this labs feature.

In other more pertinent news.  I finished watching a video from a former luminary at the company at which I am now employed.  This entrepreneur made a presentation several months ago at MIT on SaaS and startups.  There were a lot of interesting points, particularly given his background in my industry.  

The biggest single takeaway I got was the value of the ability to collect analytics on applications distributed via SaaS vs. enterprise installations.  This is definitely true for us - there's no way we can get user logs or other info from our large fortune500 clients to help us improve our software.  However, if we hosted our software all in ASP we would have the ability to monitor what parts of the apps were used and how our clients use them.  The potential for tying this back to development projects and marketing decisions is pretty exciting. We have a regular Change Control Board meeting for my product where we rate features and determine the perceived value to our clients of implementing them.  It would be awesome to be able to rate these features, develop them, install them, and then monitor their usage in such a way that we could *actually* derive what the value to our clients is.

Other keys, I learned a couple new terms - CoCA and CHI.

CoCA - Cost of Customer Acquisition

CHI - Customer Happiness Index

Making accurate CHI measurements requires strong product usage analytics.  Kudos to whoever came up with the play on words for the CHI acronym.