April 28, 2008

Web 2.0: Sharing Slides

Last week’s Web 2.0 conference here in San Francisco was stimulating. I know I learned a thing or three.

In case you missed it — or wouldn’t throw down the cash for entrance to the full convention — we’ve collected the slides from our two biggest presentations of the week.

First, here are the slides from Lane and Thor’s presentation, Customer Service is the New Marketing:

And here are the slides from Scott’s talk, The How of OAuth, about that scrappy up-and-coming OAuth protocol:

Thanks to everyone who showed up and asked all those great questions.

Plus, thanks to everyone who attended Cameron’s OAuth Hackathon on Saturday. We had a huge turnout, especially considering it was such a stunningly sunny Spring day. Thanks for spending it indoors with us!

By Eric Suesz | Posted in customer service, conferences, development, Satisfaction, web 2.0 | Comments (0)
April 18, 2008

OAuth Hackathon

Get Satisfaction is organizing a meet-up — next Saturday — to help app developers wrap their heads around and implement the OAuth protocol. If you haven’t heard of it, OAuth is how users can give access to their information on one application on a second app without sharing all of their identity. If you’ve ever used an app that requested permission to access your Flickr account you know what it’s all about. Get Satisfaction is excited to provide OAuth support in its API.

Maybe you’ll be fired up about OAuth after attending the Web 2.0 conference next week. Maybe you’ve been meaning to figure out OAuth for awhile now. Maybe you started an OAuth project but didn’t get very far. Either way you should join us.

Here are some reasons to add OAuth to your app:

  • You want to link to a third-party app (like Get Satisfaction!) but you don’t want your users to have to create a wholly new account. With OAuth you can pass-through their credentials for a seamless, single sign-in experience
  • You want your app to be able to access user accounts on third-party OAuth-enabled apps. Use OAuth if you want to give users access to their existing Get Satisfaction accounts and functionality from within your app.
  • You want to give third-party developers the same benefits we mention above. It will increase your accessibility in the broader ecosystem of other apps.

Cameron will be emceeing this hackathon, from 2 p.m. - 8 p.m., next Saturday, April 26th, and there’ll be numerous OAuth experts on hand to help you make quick work of your implementation. Since we don’t have a massive office here at Get Satisfaction (you’d probably also get distracted by our Rock Band set-up), the folks at Six Apart have generously donated their space for this event.

You can RSVP and find out all the details here.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in open source, Tips and tricks, appearances, development, Satisfaction | Comments (0)
April 17, 2008

Web 2.0 Conference: We’re Speaking

Web 2.0 is next week. We will be there. You bet we will. In fact, we’ve got a bunch of speaking engagements lined up. Come visit us as we expound on these topics:

Start-up funding: Thor speaks in a workshop setting with Rob Hayes (First Round Capital), Jeff Clavier (Softtech VC), and Ted Rheingold (Dogster/Catster) about getting early funding for your start-up venture. The official title: Starting Up: Strategies for Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup. Topics will include financing, marketing, team, revenue models, and managing all the other hats every startup entrepreneur needs to wear. Start it up on Tuesday! 9 a.m. (Moscone West 2022)

Data portability: Leslie will be talking about user interface and data portability. In an as-yet-untitled roundtable, the focus will be on hopping from one social network to another. What can we do to make that easier? How should these kinds of interfaces be designed so that users can clearly understand how all this passing-through and jumping over works? Get on that UI on Wednesday! 10:50 a.m.

Community Management: Amy will be whispering into the ears of trolls. Not the kind that you may have read about in fairy-tale books, but the more destructive kind who try to disrupt, grief, and kill online communites. Come learn some strategies for dealing with that guy on your Web site who seems to have a wealth of time on his hands and a whole lot of ire to share with the world. Trolls on Wednesday! 1:30 - 2:20 p.m. [Note: This one is part of Web 2.0pen — a free event (you can register for a free pass).]

Customer Service: Thor and Lane’s Customer Service is the New Marketing presentation is for those folks who are into fanatical devotion. No, not the religious kind; the kind that people feel toward their favorite companies and products. If your organization needs to get religion and fix your customer service problems, get thee to a seat early for this one. Customer Care Thursday! 2:40 - 3:30 p.m.

OAuth: Scott’s The How of OAuth will get you up and running with OAuth. What is it? How does it work? How do you get started? Scott shows you why it’s not the big wrestling match you might think, provided you take a simple, measured, Zen-like approach. OAuth on Friday! 2:40 - 3:30 p.m.

… More Web 2.0 news as it happens.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in customer service, community, Tips and tricks, conferences, appearances, development | Comments (0)
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)
April 9, 2008

Extending the Conversation on Get Satisfaction

Walk into a room with eight people having a conversation, and you’re bound to notice a number of extra details — the mood of the room, for example. We’re trying to capture these kinds of details and display them on Get Satisfaction so everyone can see what’s happening around the discussion. This week, we made new strides on this front by releasing a new version of the topic page.

The topic page is where all the conversation happens, and this new one has a number of notable improvements:

Sharing: Know any helpful people? We’re betting you do, so we’ve made it easier to share topics, either by sending an e-mail to someone about the topic, or by sharing it through other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg. This is a great way for both users of our site and employees to quickly share a topic with colleagues or friends — or anyone who might be able to contribute to the conversation.

Status: You can now see when a topic has been “answered” or “solved.” Both users and companies can indicate when they think this has happened, and the status sits at the top of the page. It’s a great way to get a feel for what’s already happened (and what to expect for the future of the conversation) when you land on a topic page.

Best answers: We’ve taken away the ability to mark a reply someone has made as “useful.” Instead, we’re letting people indicate which replies they think are the best, and those “best answers” get pushed to the top of the page. It’s a lightweight ranking system that also serves to put the most popular solution right under the problem being discussed. Not everyone will agree on the “best answer” to a particular question, but this is a great way to find the answer that seems to work for most people, while still allowing for disagreement on the finer details.

Mood: One of our favorite aspects of Get Satisfaction is emotion. We love emoting. Now, when you see a topic page, you’ll see the mood of the room displayed as a bar chart made up of the emoticon-like faces you’ve grown accustomed to. It’s a fun aspect of Get Satisfaction that we’ve extended to help gauge the mood of the room. We’re into fun.

newcomments.png

Comments: In any group conversation, you hear a lot of one-liners, asides, and remarks about things other people say. These short snippets of conversation are generally aimed at one person, and they’re often not intended to be given the same weight as a formal reply. To capture that aspect of group conversation, we’ve added comments. These are short text responses you can use to indicate encouragement, praise, criticism — or plain old hooting and hollering. Again, this is a way to add emotion, but without using emoticons.

Beyond all of this, there are a number of smaller changes that you may or may not notice, depending on how much time you have already spent browsing Get Satisfaction. The layout is much clearer and easier to read based on a lot of design work from our crack team. We’ve added some new stats so you can see how many people are participating and what they think of the ideas being discussed. The list goes on, but you can see how it all works by visiting this conversation on Get Satisfaction.

While you’re there, tell us what you think.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in community, appearances, design, development, Satisfaction | Comments (1)