The good folks at ReadWriteWeb quickly noticed that the new service behaves an awful lot like Get Satisfaction. Aww shucks! We’re really flattered … but more important, we’re happy for all the users who are going to get great support from the new system.

If I try to do some mind reading for a moment, I have a feeling that the scalability-obsessed GoogleBot realized two things:

1. No matter how often you update your FAQs, or how well your search algorithm works, the machine can’t always answer users’ questions. It’s a “long-tail” problem, with the tail being defined by how rapidly the knowledge base needs to change.

2. Forums (or Google Groups, in this case) are just too uncontrollable and chaotic to effectively crowd-source customer support, and the answers — if they are there — are just too hard to find. It’s a structural problem that can’t be solved without an “outcomes orientation” built into the system.

These are problems that Get Satisfaction began solving more than a year ago, so here’s the part where we shamelessly market ourselves: If you have a company that wants to provide high-touch, highly scalable customer support while keeping costs low — then be like Google and use our service.

It’s great to see the Googlers jumping on the customer-service bandwagon!

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.

Notably great experiences are punctuated by a moment of “wow,” when the product or service delights, anticipates the needs of, or pleasantly surprises a customer. OXO’s Good Grips Angled Measuring Cup triggers such a moment of wow. A set of angled markings on the OXO cup lets you quickly measure liquids for recipes without having to stop cooking and bend over. Suddenly a little part of your life is easier, because OXO thought carefully about the way you cook. This delightful surprise resonates because it feels tailored to your needs.

This essay resonates with the work we’re doing, because it speaks to those moments where companies genuinely interact with their customers — not as numbers in a spreadsheet or tables in a CRM database but as people with thoughts, concerns, feelings, and most importantly, a need for surprise, empathy, and delight.

With Satisfaction, we’re working to build a tool, a service, and an experience that allows companies to find ways to make these delightful moments more regular, more repeatable, more enticing — more “wow,” really. And longer-term, our goal is to create ways for companies that succeed in producing those wow moments to derive the maximum amount of value from them. We’re developing tools to help companies translate the effect of these wow moments into internally valuable and quantifiable benefits — not just increased sales, but also cost savings, marketing outreach, market research, future product development, and any other touchpoints we can find where consumer affection and joy can be funneled back into a company’s bottom line.

So customers are happy, because they get regular moments of surprise and delight from the companies and products they care about, and companies are happy because they’ve maximized the internal benefit of that experiential response, guaranteeing that they’re going to want to provide it again and again. Everybody wins!

The essay is well worth reading in its entirety. And best of all, the closest Brandon gets to mentioning Apple is the iPod+Nike sports kit — no small feat when you’ve got as big and obvious an example as the entire iPod ecosystem (with its wildly dedicated fan base) looming right there in front of you.

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.