Satisfaction - People-Powered Customer Service

Satisfaction has launched (more on their blog). Disclaimer: officially I'm a "member" of their "advisory board" (airquotes because it sounds more important than it seems -- unofficially, I talked to Lane every so often over the past few months and they patterned some design/interaction decisions similar to the ways I run MetaFilter and Ask MetaFilter).

I'm happy to see the site going public, I think they've got some great ideas and a great design, and it'll be interesting to watch them grow. At the moment, they're a great way to get tech support help from regular folks instead of the large companies that typically have bad tech support and I'm sure a lot of smaller companies might just use them for all their support needs (why reinvent the trouble ticket wheel for the 1000th time?). If enough small companies get on board, it'll be interesting to see how larger corporations interact with the service. I think the challenge out of the gate will be to keep things helpful and on a positive note, without descending completely into a consumer rant/spew/rage kind of thing that sites like Consumerist sometimes veer into.

Check it out -- there's not much there now but I think it'll turn into something really useful and novel in a short period of time.