Just found something intensely cool.

I discovered over the weekend that my twitterfeed had not been working (i.e. it hadn't been posting my new blog posts to Twitter) for a couple of weeks. I went to the help site to try and figure out what happened, and ended up on this site: Get Satisfaction is a one-stop "help center" for a whole ton of companies and services including Apple, PBwiki, Brightkite, Seesmic, Mozilla, MyBlogLog, Paypal (the company with the worst customer service on the planet, IMHO - hate 'em intensely since they bought over Verisign who used to be great). And apparently more are being added every day!

But here's the rub. This site is truly social. Anyone can add any company, to report a problem or to praise their services.

Is your company already on there? You can claim it, then add topics, add favorite products or services, and spread the word using widgets. But it doesn't stop there! You can list your employees (who are then shown as "listening and participating") - and you can list "official reps" as well as other employees.

And here's the killer - under the "Overheard" tab, you get a list of the most recent tweets (from Twitter, powered by Summize search) that mention your company:

"Support customer conversations across the Web

Overheard lists out the most recent Twitter posts ("tweets") related to this company. Anyone, employee or customer, can convert a tweet into a Get Satisfaction conversation. Overheard notifies the original Twitter poster of the discussion started in response to their issue.

* Learn more about Twitter
* See all Overheard replies

Subscribe to Overheard

Last update was 5 hours ago
Next update in about 1 hour
Update it now"

It's a perfect place to start listening.

But there's more! The individual user can sign in to create a dashboard which keeps track of all the helpdesk queries you've made in one place. Under the "contacts" tab, you can save the names of all the people who help you get answers. You can search your own contacts from gmail, Twitter and other places who are already in there. You can add any company to your profile that you use regularly from the massive list of available companies. You can list yourself as an employee of a participating company if you are one, and thereby act as "helper" for queries. You can set up RSS feeds for the replies to your queries!

And the helpdesk itself? That's how I got here. I posted my question. I was asked to indicate with a little smiley how I felt (happy, sad, frustrated...). I was asked to tag my question. Then once posted, I can now "share" my question by email, on Twitter, Facebook or any number of other sites. And I can see related topics.

This all sounds complicated all written out like this, but the beauty of it is that it was all incredibly simple to do and simple to understand. Everywhere I clicked I thought, OMG! This rocks!!

Want to know more? Here's some press: Fast Company , Business Week and the New York Times.

This is an amazing example of companies sharing and collaborating in the social space - without having to formalize anything. These hundreds of companies are sharing a helpdesk service, for free, and in doing so tapping into the collective knowledge of their customers as well as being able to give access to their own employees. You have to assume that this will translate into milllions of happy people who have had their questions answered quickly and easily - and who will therefore spread the word about the particular company they were dealing with.

There must be a way associations and non-profits can tap into this model of sharing.

I have seen the future and the future is here.