Get Satisfaction is a consumer web service that allows users to discuss complaints, problems, and ideas about any product, service, or company. Users can support one another, band together to indicate a common problem or need, and companies are invited to join in and give "official" responses to users on the site. Get Satisfaction is a great idea, and many companies are already participating, including some big ones like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

The API will allow companies to build services on top of the Get Satisfaction infrastructure. As president Lane Becker suggests, a company could recreate their Get Satisfaction area on their own site, or they could build widgets to expose their support channels to readers on the company blog, or the social networking profiles of employees. "Or create some clever visualizations that help you better understand what your customers are saying," writes Becker.

On the consumer end, the API could be used to create tools that make it easier for people to create and track discussions around companies and products. We think it might be interesting for someone to create a mashup that tracks which companies are the most talked about on the site, as well as the overall mood of each (i.e., which company has the most optimistic customers? the most frustrated?).

The Get Satisfaction crew has released Ruby and PHP libraries for the API, which are available on the new, Mashery-hosted developer site. The API also supports OAuth, a third party identification protocol that will make it easy for companies to integrate Get Satisfaction services into their existing user ID system by passing users into the Get Satisfaction system and automatically creating/linking accounts there.

In a blog post, Becker promised additional "API-related tricks ... in the coming weeks and months" from Get Satisfaction.