The Get Satisfaction API is here!

Our shiny, shiny API, previously announced and much-discussed and anticipated, is ready for the prime time! Check out the extensive documentation for it on our brand spankin’ new developer’s site, powered by our pals over at Mashery.

Our goal with the API is to expose every part of the Get Satisfaction service, so that companies and customers alike who have clever ideas about how to integrate, build on top of, and/or extend the Get Satisfaction service can just do that. All sorts of possibilities await: Recreate your company’s area in Get Satisfaction entirely on your own site. Or recreate Get Satisfaction for more than just one company — do it for a whole class of products and services, and prove your expertise across an entire category. Maybe you don’t like the way our posting or topic listing page works? Make your own! Dig in deep and integrate relevant topics right into your online product catalog, or mash our topics up with your already existing discussion or comment groups. Built a couple of widgets to show off your answers on your own blog. Or create some clever visualizations that help you better understand what your customers are saying (I hear Google can help with that.)

In other words, do whatever seems like it’ll be fun, interesting, stunning, and/or useful. And while you’re doing that, we’re going to keep working to make it better, faster, and easier to use our API. To that end, we’ve got a couple of things going on:

  • We’ve put together both Ruby and PHP libraries for the API, to help you get up and running quicker.
  • We’ve fully embraced OAuth as our third party identification protocol of choice, to ensure seamless, user-friendly, and secure account integration between Get Satisfaction and all the companies that choose to work with us. No need to create Yet Another Account to use Get Satisfaction — now you can pass your customers directly into our system and auto-create/link accounts together (with their permission, of course.) You can read more about how to work with our OAuth implementation, and we’ll be talking more about the benefits of OAuth right on this here blog in the next couple of days.
  • And just to be coy and teasing: we’ve got a few more API-related tricks up our sleeve in the coming weeks and months, so keep an eye out for those.

Of course, we’re ready to discuss all your API-related questions, problems, ideas, likes, and dislikes right here in Get Satisfaction. I may have said this before, but it bears repeating: We can’t wait to see what you come up with! So once your creation has made it out into the world, please be sure to let everybody know.

API! API! API!

Here’s some news that will make some of you very, very happy: Get Satisfaction is superclose to releasing a RESTful API (including some very cool OAuth support) through which you can access almost all of our current features and functionality. Hurray!

(Ed note: If you’ve never heard of an API, or if “OAuth” sounds like some creepy weird thing you’d find in some dark corner of the Web, don’t worry about it. Just rest assured that our adding them is great news for everybody who frequents the site, because it means a lot more interesting uses of Get Satisfaction that will hugely benefit you are just over the horizon.)

We know some of you developers out there are itching to bake Get Satisfaction into your own site, have a desire to integrate Get Satisfaction more extensively into your own customer support systems, or just want to build some interesting little app on top of Get Satisfaction to make it work a little better for you. We’re all for every one of those things, too. And though we’re still a little ways away from a full public release of the API, we want to open up access to those of you that are ready to get started as soon as we possibly can.

So if you’re ok with not having a whole bunch of documentation available to you before you jump in and get coding, and if you don’t mind that some things might break/change along the way, email us (tim at getsatisfaction dot com ought to do it) and I’ll add you to our alpha list. We’re hoping to have the initial push out before the end of the week, and when we do you’ll be the first to know.

And the reviews start to roll in…

Or the pre-reviews, anyway, since we haven’t technically launched yet. But a couple of folks have been poking around on Satisfaction and have said some nice things — specifically, Liz Gannes over at GigaOM and Rafe Needleman over at Webware. Check ‘em out and, also, here’s a hint: you can follow a link or two in those stories to get a glance at our sneak preview yourself. Enjoy!

Update: Scott Beale over at Laughing Squid, too. Laughing Squid, for the record, is an excellent Web hosting service with especially good customer service.

Get in line for a (virtual) iPhone!

Are you on Facebook? Then get in line for a (virtual) iPhone using our shiny new “iPhone” Facebook app.

Sooner’s better — we’re giving them out to a select couple of folks tomorrow first, and the ones who get in line earlier are more likely to get first dibs. But don’t worry if you don’t get one right away — we’re making ‘em as fast as we can, and will be sharing ‘em more over the next couple of weeks as we get restocked. Of course, in the meantime, you can always barter them with your friends…

One thing’s for sure, it’s definitely better than ending up like these guys:

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