I think it's quite bad form to publicly attack another company like this without discussing it in private first. I see no indication that there was any communication between 37Signals and GetSatisfaction prior to this very public post.

I've had this kind of thing done to me before, and I think it's really out of order. Essentially, 37Signals have decided, in this case, to trade politeness and "being good" for making a big noise and getting some page views and attention.

It's easy to criticise people publicly without trying to understand what's going on first. I'd love to say that I expected better from 37-Signals, but considering that their blog has been so focused on generating page views through negative disagreement, I'm not all that surprised that they do this as well.

Here's a challenge for 37-signals: Why not try to do positive things, rather than frame everything as a confrontational disagreement? Yes, being an arse generates page views, but so do other undesirable behaviour. Is that really the way you want to go in the long term?

For 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."

We 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.

It's funny that Thor@GS, in the comments, points out that they're continuing to use non-free logo images, on the auspices that they're using them the same way a Wiki would.

It is in fact not easy to use non-free company logo images on Wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logos

* Demonstrable encyclopedic merit (you can't just upload and tag a logo)

* Noncommercial use of the mark

* No dilution of the trademark --- ie, you can't make it appear that the company sanctioned your use of the logo.

Doesn't GS flunk all three of these tests?

The site also hosts, without permission, company support pages for over 14,000 companies. They’ll use your logo, title the page “Customer service & support for [COMPANY NAME HERE]” and generally make it feel like an officially sanctioned place to get official support from the company in question.

If they're using your company's logo and name, and those are a registered trademark, isn't that grounds for a lawsuit? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that trademark law is supposed to prevent? (One company purporting to be associated with another when it isn't)

I know there's a reason a I can't make my own cola, slap a Pepsi logo on it and sell it out of the back of my truck. I thought this was it.

I'm a bit amazed by a lot of these responses. I sympathize with the idea that problems should be worked out with friendliness and civility, but this sort of thing is not a question of etiquette that Fried mishandled. These are actions by Get Satisfaction that could easily lead to serious lawsuits.

I suggest that folks in web businesses who look at this and see the major concern here as the tone of an aggrieved blog post should make sure they have good lawyers to run their ideas by.

I 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.

To 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.

It sounds more like fraud and misrepresentation.

What's the difference between something like this and Yelp? (Why is this bad, and Yelp's not? Is it because people here all have online businesses, and don't want a forum where people could say something bad about them?)

Garrett Dimon's comments are the only voice of reason on that page.

Posts like that are useless, yet I'm sure Jason will use all the "I agree, GS is lame" comments from his fan club to validate his reasons for posting.

Thor Muller posts an open letter to Jason Fried:

http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/open-letter-to-ja...

...and negates 95% of the "he should have been nicer about it" complaints about the original post by saying "And while I would have preferred you sending us a note, or even posting it somewhere less trafficked than your popular blog, the fact is that Get Satisfaction is a huge proponent of public airing of grievances. You were right to bring it to our attention any way you saw fit."

sue them

So GetSatisfaction mildy misrepresents their association with 37Signals and uses their IP without authorization.. and 37Signals counters with a potentially slanderous letter in a public forum? Not exactly a great way to start a dialogue or build a legal case.

Most any other company would first engage with a civil, private, discussion, followed by legal action before firing off a public lambasting as a last resort (a rare event at that.)

There may be some valid points in the post, but whining in public makes you like a fool, to customers, to other businesses and to the public at large. Totally unprofessional.

Thor Muller 31 Mar 09

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.

According to this DoucheWeasel, GS tried to say that their page about 37signals is not sanctioned/approved by 37signals, but failed.

Instead they ended up implying that 37signals doesn't care about their customers. Whoops.

Have you ever tried to type "This space is not officially sanctioned by 37signals" but made a few typos and ended up typing "37signals is not committed to open an conversation" instead?

Gosh, that mistake could happen to anyone!

We need someone to start up a site that provides user feedback on GetSatisfaction, using GetSatisfaction's look-and-feel. Taste of their own medicine.

Those "getsatisfaction" people need to be eradicated.

TOTAL rats in suits - I wish I could tell you all who and what, but a person I know (former client) has enough on them to get them thrown in the bighouse.

Get Satisfaction got Customer Service Served by 37Signals, ouch!

Is 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.