Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
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Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
#2It sounds more like fraud and misrepresentation.
Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
#3For what it's worth, Thor Muller (Cofounder of Get Satisfaction) responded in the comments and said the wording was a mistake and would be changed immediately:
"Gosh, we messed up on the wording of that badge and are changing it pronto. The wording on that badge was actually intended to explicitly state that the space was NOT OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED by the company, but that doesn’t come off at all. The idea is to encourage openness, and provide a badge for companies that want to be associated with it. This was just unfortunate phrasing (one small part of an ongoing redesign effort), and doesn’t reflect our values, as I think many, many people and companies who’ve used our service can attest."
Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
#4We switched to UserVoice because GetSatisfaction is often simply broken. Way too many links have just failed.
Try to count the steps for a new user to leave feedback. There must be at least 10.
Our UserVoice widget (http://tipjoy.com/feedback ), also has a really easy email form.
Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
#5sue them
Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
#6I don't have any strong feelings about Get Satisfaction (or any of the other sites like this), but we made http://featurelist.org available for free to anyone who wants a lighter approach to that sort of thing. It focuses a bit more on the feature request side than the technical support pieces, but it might be interesting to some of you.
Once we catch our breath from our other sites, we're going to provide featurelist.org as open source (PHP/CodeIgniter) in case people are hesitant to host their user feedback on someone else's site.
For our own usage, we really just needed a way to track feature requests and have YC-inspired feedback widgets for our own sites. So we opened that service up for everyone to use.
Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
#7For what it's worth, Thor Muller (Cofounder of Get Satisfaction) responded in the comments and said the wording was a mistake and would be changed immediately: "Gosh, we messed up on the wording of that badge and are changing it pronto. The wording on that badge was actually intended to explicitly state that the space was NOT OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED by the company, but that doesn’t come off at all. The idea is to encou…
The text in the badge is/was:
37signals has not yet committed to open conversation about its products and services. Encourage them to join and support the Company-Customer Pact.
I really have a hard time believing that this was an oversight. It is at the top of almost every page. When you consider GetSatisfaction's strategy it is even well written.
Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
#8To prefix all this: I've never really looked in to Get Satisfaction for anything except a couple of random posts on other companies pages there. I can see where 37 Signals is coming from with the whole not being committed to an open conversation thing but I think the whole article is a bit sensational. A guy from Get Satisfaction even jumps in and says they messed up with that badge. They do need to make money some how and targeted ads seem like a good idea for that. It really strikes me as a young company that's just making a couple of mistakes and I don't think they deserved this PR. I wonder if anyone at 37S tried to contact GS before making this post. If they did then it was deserved but if not I'm not so sure.
Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
#9For what it's worth, Thor Muller (Cofounder of Get Satisfaction) responded in the comments and said the wording was a mistake and would be changed immediately: "Gosh, we messed up on the wording of that badge and are changing it pronto. The wording on that badge was actually intended to explicitly state that the space was NOT OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED by the company, but that doesn’t come off at all. The idea is to encou…
That badge has been on GetSatisfaction pages for as long as I can remember, at least a year. I find it hard to believe that it could be an oversight.
Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
#10Is that really Get Satisfaction's doing, or was it a 37signals fanboy who put that together without permission?
Snagging the look-and-feel (graphics, colours, etc.) of a target's site is particularly sleazy and it seems very odd if Get Satisfaction has chosen to go that route for their business.
Unless Get Satisfaction provides a prominent "request this forum be deleted" link, and actually removes a forum on request, I wouldn't touch these guys with the proverbial 10' pole if site mimicking has become their standard practice.