I was thinking the same thing. Although when you think about it, fundamentally it's no different than Yelp or Zaggats. It's just another level of service layered on top of a directory.
Service for whom? It doesn't serve the business - I'm sure they'd much rather people contact them directly - and it doesn't serve the customer - who wants to deal with a middleman when your toilet's overflowing? The only one served by this is the middleman, who gets to hijack leads and extort businesses.
The value added over a "dumb" directory is that you can use ratings to inform your decision instead of taking the service provider's word of being "the best in town".
I'm not making this stuff up, tons of people use Yelp, Zaggats, GetSatisfaction, etc so obviously they're seeing value somewhere.
I use Yelp all the time, so I agree with you that there is value in a directory with ratings. But the value of Yelp comes from the carefully crafted community that I feel I can trust, not from some random star rating from faceless people, and I certainly wouldn't get any value if Yelp stepped in as a forced intermediary if I wanted to contact the business (that would make me stop using it immediately, actually).
No, GetSatisfaction is different. The business model of Yelp or Zaggats is to sell ad space or books or whatnot. The business model of GetSatisfaction is to get companies to pay them so that the company can take down negative information about itself.
With Yelp, there is no option for a business to pay them $100 per month so that you can take down bad reviews of your restaurant. That's a fundamental difference. GetSatisfaction has a desire to get users writing things on their site so that the company their writing about gets over a barrel where they have to pay them "protection money" to remove bad things people complain about their service. And $100 isn't much for the ability to silence a bunch of people bad-mouthing your service.
GetSatisfaction's wording has even tried to push the point using phrasing like "X is not yet participating" and "X has not yet committed to open conversation about its products and services" (which used to be their tagline). They both try to make it sound like they've approached X and X has declined to participate. That's different from a review site where users can say what they want, but there's no claim that the place being reviewed has declined to participate.
If you allow users to post negative things about a business, fine. If you allow users to post negative things about a business and then go to that business and ask them for $100/mo to silence those negative things, not fine.
If you allow companies to participate in the conversation and say, "we have no affiliation with X" for the companies who have nothing to do with your forum, fine. If you make it sound like the company is trying to avoid your forum because they're scared of the truth, not fine.
The devil's in the details. Here, HelpHive is trying to put themselves in a position where users have their number for places of business rather than that place of business' number. In the future, there's nothing to stop them from adding ads for competitors (and offering to connect the caller to that competitor) or worse, if they're really successful and become an online directory that a lot use, holding customers for ransom.
What it comes down to is truth. GetSatisfaction is obscuring the truth by allowing companies to moderate for a price and by using misleading language about the companies who aren't paying them. HelpHive is obscuring the truth by telling customers that their number is the number of the business they want to call. People don't get uppity about Yelp or Zaggats because, while a user can post an untrue review or a reviewer might have just seen a bad night, it's a lot closer to the truth and a lot more fair. If you're getting a massive amount of bad reviews on Yelp, that's not good for you, but at least Yelp isn't coming along to extort $100 out of you to get rid of those bad reviews.