We’re extremely proud and excited about these two new things we’ve created. Here’s the scoop:

Help Center

There’s a key detail about what we’re doing at Get Satisfaction that is sometimes hard to make shine through: We’re not trying to build a place where companies and customers are compelled to come to resolve their differences. That is, we’re not trying to capture people and keep them here. What we’re ultimately focused on is increasing the connections between companies and their customers. And that can happen anywhere. In fact, for best results, it should be happening in as many places as possible.

In that spirit, we’ve created the Get Satisfaction Help Center. It’s a PHP installation you can download and drop right onto your own Web site. It’s as easy as setting up a blog, and it allows you to push and pull all of the data from Get Satisfaction in a seamless way. Simply put: It’s our site on your site.

Here are a few examples already up and running: Joby, makers of the Gorillapod, Skitch, and a highly modified version for MyBlogLog. You can also see a default installation running for our own section of Get Satisfaction.

Since Help Center is based on PHP (surely the Web’s most popular programming language), it’s easy to install and customize. We offer some very pretty templates you can use, but we also encourage you to adapt it to your own site’s look and feel. After all, you’ve probably spent countless hours honing your company’s visual style. Go get it now and make it yours. Let us know if you have any questions right here in Get Satisfaction.

Also, a side note to developers. Help Center is actually an open source application hosted on Google Code under the MIT license, so if one of your modifications really rocks, you can share it back with everybody else!

Overheard

Ever wished you could respond to what people are saying about your company anywhere they’re saying it? Of course you do. I bet you wouldn’t mind chiming in about what people are saying about other companies, too, huh?

To help fulfill that need, we’ve added the Overheard feature. It’s a way for people to monitor and extend the conversations going on around companies and their products. Yep, we’ve got tons of that going on already on Get Satisfaction, but these conversations are from Twitter. That’s right: Twitter. You’ve probably noticed that Twitter is quickly becoming more than just a way to send shout-outs to your friends. It’s transforming into a primary attention stream.

Overheard tracks Twitter conversations — “tweets” — that mention a specific company or its products and displays them in a list. If you see a tweet that you think would needs an in-depth response or would make a great topic on Get Satisfaction, turn that tweet into a Get Satisfaction topic with a click. Anyone on Get Satisfaction can do this, and we ping the user on Twitter to let them know that we’ve started a new topic based on their tweet. It’s a great way to locate conversations going on out there in the wild and provide rich, archived (i.e. searchable) responses on the Get Satisfaction network. Combine this with Help Center, and companies are now able to bring distributed Web conversations into their everyday operations, improving their customer service and fostering retention.

If this idea of tracking mentions on Twitter isn’t something you’ve considered before, you might find that it’s a superb way to not only find out what people are saying about a company and its products, but also to connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach. If you’re an admin for your company, you can even set additional keywords and tune this Twitter stream.

Go check it out for companies like Ebay, Comcast, Google, even the US Government. We think you’ll be surprised at just how neat it is.

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.

(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.

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

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: