Renowned mumtrepreneur and cake baker Hayley Marsden has put together a list of Help Desk Apps That Probably Don’t Suck.

Hayley writes on her blog "Personally I find the best way to avoid unhappy customers is to have an efficient way of putting that cute little smile back on their cute little faces [...] Here’s a list of help desk applications that I would happily use".

We're really happy to see Zendesk top that list: "Zendesk seems to be the Basecamp of help desks; everybody’s talking about it and fittingly, it offers integration with Highrise. It’s idiot-friendly, attractive, brandable, does reporting and ranges from $19 to $475 per month in price. There’s a limited free forever option available plus a 30-day free trial of the paid plans. Basically, if you can’t be bothered to read any further and just want someone to tell you what to get, get Zendesk.".

This is one of the most up-to-date comparisons of online customer support solutions out there right now, and Hayley has done a terrific job. Haley, we're glad that we don't suck, and we think you're pretty cool too.

By popular demand we hereby repost the html snippet you can insert in your own page, to have the incredible online-version of the Zendesk Buddha Machine on your own web site. Just like the one you see it in the right-hand column of this blog.

If you embed it in your web site or blog, do make a blog post about it and we will send you a live physical version of the little player full of zen.

One of Zendesk's unique selling points is the ability to have an online customer care solution up and running from one day to the other. Signing up for the service is completed in minutes and if you can do with the standard processes and workflow that come out of the box, you can put the help desk into production almost instantly. It's configured for most standard situations, and you will get to know the system by using it.

We call that beautifully simple. Allowing you to stay focused on your business while implementing an online customer care solution, hitting the ground running.

Dan Lauer from StorePorter in Harrison, Idaho, wrote us an email to share exactly such an experience from his small biz shop:

Daniel D. Lauer
StorePorter"

We admit it. We're suckers for these compliments. We love to make our customers look great just as much as they love their help desk.

As more and more business moves online so does your need for providing excellent online customer care. Zendesk can help you look great online.

Two weeks ago Tweeters from 202 cities all over the world got together for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water.

So far more than $250,000 have been collected for the cause, and the organizers are still counting. Get the latest update on the Twestival site.

Zendesk was a happy drinks sponsor for the Twestivals in Auckland, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Copenhagen and Boston. The twestivals in Copenhagen and Boston collected $2,600 and $4,000 respectively.

Our friends in Melbourne have suggested donating proceeds from the Melbourne leg of the Twestival to the Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal, following the devastating bushfires that have swiped the region recently.

Pictures from Copenhagen and Boston Twestivals. Photos by Niklas Stephenson and Ava Photography respectively.

Earlier today we received this in our inbox:

Hey Zendesk guys!

Tiago Soromenho
Founder & CTO
StickyStreet, LLC

Thanks Tiago, we love you too. Great that you wanted to share this with us.

Yammer provides micro blogging for internal use in companies and organizations. Micro blogging is great for informally posting ideas, sharing information and asking questions.

And now your support team can also post ticket updates and solutions directly to your Yammer account. Identical to the previously announced Twitter target, Zendesk now has a Yammer target that you can fire off with all ticket updates.

We've already started using this ourselves and are looking forward to feedback and ideas from our customers.

If you're in San Francisco tomorrow, Zendesk friends and fools will meet at Medjool from 6-8pm. And you're welcome too. See you then.

As announced last week, Zendesk now supports multiple languages for the customer-facing front-end. As an account admin simply select "Personalize your Zendesk" from the Account tab and select the language you want.

Currently Zendesk offers support for English, Danish, Spanish and Chinese with Portuguese and German coming very soon.

The translations are a crowdsourced effort, so if you want to implement a translation to e.g. French, Australian English or Japanese, simply email support@zendesk.com stating your account name and language.

The translation interface is available directly from your help desk and a full translation can be completed in approx two hours.

The Zendesk Meet-up in Auckland was a big success and we want to thank everybody for making it such a nice event. Especially our friends from the Auckland Tweet-up who joined us this evening.

Next chance to meet Zendesk near you is on Thursday at the Twestivals in Auckland, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Copenhagen and Boston, where Zendesk is a happy drinks sponsor. Hope to see you then!

Last year we launched an integration to Salesforce.com, and last month the Zendesk Ticket View 1.3.5 application officially arrived to the Force.com AppExchange as an AppExchange Certified Application.

The Zendesk Ticket View application provides an easy view of current Zendesk tickets for your Salesforce.com accounts and contacts.

This weekend's update to Zendesk brings additional Salesforce.com integration to Zendesk. A new Salesforce widget can be inserted on all ticket pages, and allows you to look up ticket requester directly in your Salesforce.com account.

Say you receive a support request from an Ashley James, the widget is populated with the email address of Ashley and can instantly look up any details you have on Ashley in your Salesforce system and display it directly in the widget.

As always we welcome your feedback.

Due to Salesforce.com API regulations, the widget will only work with Enterprise and Unlimited Salesforce accounts.

Internationalization is coming to Zendesk next week. So if your customers speak French, Spanish, Chinese, Dutch or Welch your Zendesk help desk can too.

Initially we will launch Spanish, Chinese and Danish language support, but additional languages are following soon thereafter. Zendesk i18n is a crowdsourced project, which means that you can make your own translations and even translation variations.

If you want to make a translation, please send an email to support@zendesk.com stating what language (or dialect) you want to translate Zendesk to, and the account name of your Zendesk help desk.

On Thursday, 12 February 2009, 175+ cities around the world will be hosting Twestivals which bring together Twitter communities for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water.

Zendesk is a happy drinks sponsor for the Twestivals in Auckland, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Copenhagen and Boston, and hope thereby to encourage even more people to come.

Our good friends at Coremedia, one of Europes's leading CMS providers, have taken advantage of Zendesk's Widget API to build a Mood Barometer for their Zendesk help desk. The barometer widget gives Coremedia's customers the ability to provide a short and quick statement on how they estimate the progress of a ticket regarding the reaction time and answer quality.

You can read more about it on Coremedia's blog, and the team have also promised to give us the full details on the widget in our support forums.

Great to see this type of implementation.

From Charlotte, NC, this just in:

When VergePoint was hired to implement a support system for a call center handling more than 80,000 call minutes per month the first candidate was Zendesk. Jason Prance from VergePoint says “Zendesk’s web 2.0 attitude and witty approach to customer service pulled us right in. In less than one week, the client was live on Zendesk and handling support tickets more efficiently than with the previous system."

Andrew Stallings is a freelance developer working with VergePoint. Andrew did the integration of Zendesk into the existing e-commerce cart and tells us; “Having done many similar integrations in the past, these tasks are generally quite complex, time consuming and costly. The Zendesk Remote Authentication API is created in a way that gives the developer the freedom to program this however he wants on his end, while all the complicated logic is handled on their end. This is one of the best API’s I’ve ever used.”

Thank you both Jason and Andrew for sharing this with us.

It's no longer a secret that Twitter is using Zendesk for their online support. The romance started in the summer of 2008 and Twitter has gradually rolled out Zendesk in more and more areas until they announced earlier this month, that Zendesk is now the official support platform for Twitter.

In their blog post The Zen of Twitter Support from January 15 Twitter writes "We looked at several options and found Zendesk to be a perfect fit—it works seamlessly with other tools we love such as Campfire, Highrise, and they've even created a built-in Twitter integration."

Twitter is one of these companies and technologies that are true paradigm changers. Twitter changes how a lot of us are working and communicating, and how we understand each other and what's going on in the world. We're very proud that we have the opportunity to work with the Twitter crew, and we're fascinated by their story and their technology. We already have basic Twitter integration in Zendesk, and we plan to extend that considerably this year.

We believe that the entire support industry will gain from Twitter's choice of Zendesk. We will use their experiences to make "tweets" a fully legit support channel in our continued efforts to enable true online support for the networked generation.

And we want your feedback too. Let us know how we can integrate Twitter better into support processes. You can always tweet us @zendesk.

As previously announced our next customer meet-up takes place in Auckland, New Zealand.

We invite all Zendesk customers, friends, partners and aficionados in the area to Zendesk Meet-up Auckland on Thursday February 5th from 6pm to 8pm at the Sale St Brewery. Zendesk will host drinks, cocktails and snacks.

As always you're very welcome to bring a friend or a colleague. But we kindly ask you to RSVP via the Facebook event page.

See you in Auckland!

Since we launched the Zendesk Buddha Machine Wall back in December, the little wall of soothing music has received quite some attention and is now one of the most visited pages on Zendesk.com. It's been mentioned in the New Yorker, not once, but twice, and been the subject of many blog posts like this and this other one. Especially impressive is this sample produced by Echoes’ Jeff Towne based on the wall only.

So if you haven't visited the wall already, now is the time to head over and let the soothing music encompass you and bring a little Zen to your enlightened customer support.

The Zendesk Notifier that was released for iPhone in November is now also available for the Android platform. Visit the Android Market (web mirror) and download it for free. 250 users did within 24 hours after its release.

Zendesk Notifier for the G1 Android Phone is an application that agents use to quickly see how many tickets have been assigned to them. They can also see how many unassigned tickets exist in their help desk system. The app serve as a shortcut for logging into your mobile optimized Zendesk interface from your phone.