April 16, 2008

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.

By Lane Becker | Posted in rails, development, applications, co-creation | Comments (1)
February 4, 2008

Making a Pact

picture-8.png

Tony Hsieh opened up our Customer Service is the New Marketing Summit with a compelling statement: “We’re a customer service company. We just happen to sell shoes. Twenty years from now, hopefully people won’t even remember that we sell shoes.”

That’s a strong statement from the CEO of a pretty strong company: Zappos. You may not know it, but they’re not in the shoe business. Having effortlessly bought — and effortlessly returned — many pairs of shoes from and to them, I’m inclined to agree with him. They ooze customer service.

To help us foster and encourage the kind of spirit that Tony believes in, we’ve introduced the “Company-Customer Pact,” a simple, usable framework for company-customer interaction.

The provisional draft of this document is now available at CCPact.com. We’re actively seeking community support, as well as public comments on this document. Support and comments can be voiced right on the wiki pages. Having your voice included would be terrific.

Please forward this post to folks that you’d like to hear in this conversation — or anyone you think would be interested in building better company-customer relationships.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in philosophy, customer service, open source, community, co-creation | Comments (0)
August 23, 2007

You decide who speaks at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival

Hugh Forrest, the director of the Interactive portion of the famed South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX, is one of the savviest conference organizers out there. Since 1994, he’s been instrumental in channeling the rock-and-roll energy of the SxSW Music festival to the geeks, always making diversity a priority. In a nod to the open collaborative spirit driving the Web, over the last few years he’s introduced an interactive panel-picker as a way for attendees to influence the conference content.

It’s only in its second year, but it has already broadened the diversity of potential participants in the conference. Anyone can propose a panel or presentation, and attendees can preview and rate these submissions based on what they’re interested in seeing. Like Threadless does with its t-shirt design contest, the SxSW panel-picker directly reflects the interests of its users, and by not displaying the votes of other users it keeps the system from being unduly gamed or manipulated. Hugh and his team are still the final arbiters of the event programming, so they can still curate the content based on their own experience and judgement.

To help you get the most out of the panel picker I’ve done the work for you. I’m recommending the following list of panels and presentations. If you like the kinds of things we discuss on this blog, you’ll probably like these. If you agree I encourage you to login to the panel picker and rank them highly.

In the self-promotion department, I’ll first point you to two presentations proposed separately by myself and Lane Becker:

Here are the rest of the suggestions. There were almost 700 panels to sift through, though the elegant implementation by Lindsey Simon makes it easy to filter the list to a more manageable number by keyword, skill level, and category. Nonetheless, it’s intimidating to start the process of winnowing through them. I hope this list helps shorten your path.

By Thor Muller | Posted in conferences, appearances, co-creation | Comments (2)
July 30, 2007

The ant farm of innovation

Ant Farm
An article in the NYTimes today asks whether all the hype over product co-creation and consumer directed design misses something essential–that big innovations still come from highly controlled, top-down organizations and processes. The piece, “In a Highly Complex World, Innovation From the Top Down” by G. Pascal Zachary, also makes the point that many of the most innovative products like the iPod aren’t even customizable, and fundamentally exclude the role of democracy in their design. The suggestion is that new technology is so complex that it could only be created by “corporate or government initiatives overseen by elites.”

Zachary tries to manufacture controversy by pitting “elitists” such as Thomas P. Hughes (”New technologies are becoming so complex that many are beyond the possibility of democracy playing a role in their development”) against new schoolers like Eric Wilhelm of Instructables (”If innovation isn’t tailored to [customers], they expect to be able to tailor it to themselves”). But where’s the conflict? The iPhone is a phenomenon that is Apple doing what Apple is best at (i.e. elite design), but there are thousands of developers hacking away at its hardware, operating system and applications. And as Eric von Hippel (the MIT evangelist for user-led innovation) would point out, this is where most democratic contributions are made, at the edges of the maker’s business. If history is a guide, we can expect some of these apps and hacks from users to end up influencing Apple engineers or being integrated wholesale into its products.

Many of us are attracted to this notion of ivory tower-based innovation, but it’s largely mythical. Many of us know that Thomas Edison, the original icon of the elite genius generating invention after brilliant invention, owed much of his success to raw opportunism and the willingness to crush superior technologies that threatened his business. The technology his famed Menlo Park lab produced often relied on the work of outsiders, usually mavericks and hobbyists. For instance, Edison famously took credit for the early motion picture projector known as the Vitascope, which had been invented by a couple of kids trying to distinguish themselves in trade school.

And Apple, that most singular modern epicenter of technology innovation, owes much of its success to the innovations that came from outside its hallowed walls. The early Mac was a refined set of innovations from Xerox Parc and Douglas Englebart (with design help from folks like my alma mater, Frogdesign). The resurgence of the Mac with OS X is due in part to the fact that it’s based on freeBSD, an open source UNIX system built with contributions from many scattered developers.

And the iPod, the iPod! Not at all the pure creation of isolated genius within the company that Zachary implies in his article. The iPod chip came from PortalPlayer, its interface designed in part by third-party firm Pixo, and even the iPod name was coined by a freelance copywriter.

But one thing’s for certain. Apple will never be able to farm out its MacWorld keynote presentations. There are some things that only Steve Jobs can do.

By Thor Muller | Posted in philosophy, open source, innovation, co-creation | Comments (1)
Close
E-mail It