Have you “Got Satisfaction” yet? You probably have, this is not news; between you and me I am just clearing out some of my stagnant blog ideas

Satisfaction is “people powered customer service”. The service is a few months old and was started by an Adaptive Path founder (Lane) and some former Adaptive Path tenants. They moved out, went across the street and raised a cool $1.3 million in venture funding.

As the name sorta implies, the site offers customer service for those companies that either can’t or won’t do it themselves. Have you ever had the experience of sending an email into some organization via their generic “contact us” form only to never receive a response? Well, Satisfaction aims to fix that. The service is a lot like a threaded message board focused on particular companies and/or products. I used the site to figure out why my MacBook wouldn’t detect an external display. The responses were quite fast and relevant.

Companies such as Timbuk2 and Twitter are using Satisfaction to power their entire help section. Others such as the aforementioned Apple just get to offload support to a third party at little to no cost. While the hope is that you can “crowdsource” your support from the general public, representatives from a company can participate on the site and provide “authoritative” answers to user questions. For any small site that can’t afford a full blown support department, this is a terrific alternative.