At Satisfaction anyone can list a company, product, or service on the site. Then other users can post their questions, complaints, and suggestions. Support comes from the Satisfaction community, though ideally the company in question will claim its presence on the site and send its employees in to help handle customers' concerns.

For example: Apple has no employees using Satisfaction, whereas Timbuk2 has claimed its presence and five of its employees are busily answering questions and resolving issues.

Of course there are plenty of message boards where consumers help one another out with issues, and people post rants and raves in the hope that someone from the company will see them. And sometimes companies will let their people contribute to these boards in an official capacity.  

But I really like how Satisfaction centralizes and formalizes this process, and provides easy tools to build that type of un- or semi-official support community. What will be really interesting is to see how many companies decide to use the service. Will Apple ever sign on?

Okay, it's Apple, so definitely no. But you get the idea. I think that bigger companies will be unwilling to relinquish this much control over customer service, and already have the ability to monitor the many scattered message forums discussing their products. But as a representative from Method Products notes in this BusinessWeek article, it can be a great free platform for small to medium-size businesses with big customer service needs.