You know the saying to “eat your own dog food”, when a company uses the products that it makes. It’s a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products, and to continue to develop a better experience for its consumers by having the mindset of an end-user.

The expression apparently comes from back in the 50s when the pet food division of the M&M Mars candy company was trying to sell canned dog food to grocery stores. At the time, dogs typically ate table scraps, and the thought of a grocer selling pet food was unheard of. In order to convince store managers that dog food was OK, the sales associates were instructed to open a can, pull out a juicy bit with a silver fork, and eat it. Hence — it is so good that you are willing to eat your own dog food!

In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Martiz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood”, challenging him to increase internal usage of the company’s product. From there, the usage of the term spread throughout the company, and is commonly used today in technology circles. For example, Google recently confirmed that it was testing a new concept in mobile phones, writing in a Dec 12, 2009 blog post that it was “dogfooding” the devices.

So in that spirit, we want to share with you the favorite flavors of “dog food” from the Silentale team…  and maybe it will give you some ideas of how you can find Silentale useful too:

@npellant
For me I love Silentale for the contacts system. The fact that Silentale auto-combines and organizes my contacts is top stuff for me. [This is the main reason I'm looking forward to the iPhone app -] I hate having to update my contacts – a system which does it automatically for me is fantastic. I have so many different email accounts with different people on each, it really is a lifesaver.

@lfp
Keeping up with the number of people I come in contact with is a full time job in itself! Between Silentale users, investors, press, partners, and the members of the startup community, I need to recall and keep up with tons of different companies/projects, and all our previous discussions. I’ve been using Silentale for doing just that, quick access to my contact details, as well as our discussions and documents exchanged.

@alin_alexandru
For me, Silentale is the best way to search through emails… with 6 different email accounts, it’s impossible to keep track of which account received a particular message.

@lbret
I confess that my biggest vice is laziness… after I used Silentale a couple of times to search for a name or address that I couldn’t find, I realized that I don’t need to search anywhere else. ALL my information is there, in one convenient place. For example, if I need my Truphone confirmation email, but can’t remember which of my email accounts I signed up with, I just use the Silentale search bar in Firefox to find what I need in a matter of seconds. But aren’t lazy people more productive and effective because they’re always looking for shortcuts to save time and effort?

@florentVaucelle
Being able to quickly find contact details for someone without having to check multiple accounts really saves me time. And then I can choose the best way to send them a message.

@nicolas_
I’ve exchanged a lot of valuable information with my old teammates, partners and friends. From ideas to methodologies, as well as solutions to problems we solved years ago. It happens all over the place via emails, tweets, etc and now they’re all at my fingertips. I just have to click on the photo of someone in Silentale to instantly retrieve all our exchanges. It’s like my own personal library that someone else created for me.

@Omikronn
The thing I love the most is the Firefox Add-on. It automatically detects who I’m looking at, whether in an email or on social networks, and all my latest messages as well as the contact details for that person magically appear… super handy!

@zuzur
It’s part of my day-to-day job to check that our huge archive of messages is updated and displayed in a timely fashion; we have over 40 million messages processed so far! I love having one place that keeps all my messages together (from 2 Gmail accounts, Twitter, Facebook, Google Contacts, LinkedIn etc), but I’m also a big fan of search by contact. Because I remember who I exchanged a message with easier than when or where, I can easily find what I need by searching all the messages I’ve exchanged with a particular person.

@mitztim
Having all my accounts safely archived in one place is great. It only takes 5 minutes to setup, and then I don’t have to think about it anymore!

@sferguson
One thing that drives me crazy is trying to find someone’s Twitter handle. People’s Twitter names are so different from their other networks, it’s almost impossible to keep up with them! Case in point: my colleague Catalin’s Twitter is @Omikronn… who can remember that?!? Silentale’s consolidated contact details gives me instant access to everyone’s Twitter profile without the hassle of hunting them down.

We’d love to hear how you use Silentale, either in general, or specific examples of how it’s helped you save time, find information quickly & easily, improved your ability to manage your relationships & conversations etc. Please drop us a line in the comments below or tweet us @silentale!

We asked you what connectors you wanted to see next on Silentale…and you told us! Facebook messages was one of the most popular requests.  So…ta da! We’re proud to announce that now you can keep track of all your Facebook messages, as well as the contact details of your Facebook Friends.

We believe Silentale is the first (and only!) place where you can consolidate and archive Facebook messages alongside your emails and tweets, so you can see all of your combined conversations with someone, plus keep them safe for posterity.

The setup is super simple. To add Facebook for the first time, just go to your Connectors settings, click on “Add” next to Facebook under the “Add a Connector” section on the right, and authorise your Facebook account (via Oauth), or just click here to go directly there.

If you’ve already added your Facebook Friends, then simply go to your Connectors settings, click the pencil to edit your Facebook connector in the ‘Manage your Connectors” section, and follow the instructions to include your Facebook messages.

Then go to your Timeline to see your Facebook messages pouring in! Although please allow some time for them to be properly indexed before showing up in your personal archive.

Having Facebook messages aggregated with your other main channels of communication, including emails and Tweets, gives you one place to easily check all your messages without having to visit multiple sites.

You can also view just your Facebook Friends within your People Book, to see all the messages you’ve exchanged across different communication channels.

We hope the addition of Facebook messages will really help demonstrate the power of having one unified view of all your conversations. Let us know what you think, share it with a tweet, and look for other new connectors (poll) coming soon!

Thanks to all our beta users who have taken the time to give us great quality feedback via our surveys, Tweets, support tickets etc. We really appreciate all your suggestions about how to improve Silentale to make it even more useful, and we’re busy working on rolling out the most requested features as fast as we can.

One of your top requests was to automatically present your contacts by categories in the People Book, so that you can view your contacts grouped by how you’re connected to them, as well as see how to reach them. So we’ve reorganized the People Book into 3 columns:

The left column organizes your contacts by the different sources you’ve connected.

“My Contacts” is a consolidated view of your:

• LinkedIn Connections = first-degree connections from your Linkedin account(s)
• Facebook Friends = friends from your Facebook account(s)
• Twitter Contacts = followers, followees and recipients (of @ direct messages and replies) of your twitter account(s)
• Google Contacts = contacts from your Google Contact address book(s)
• Email Recipients  = people to whom you sent a message/reply at least once by email

“Uncategorized” are the people who have sent you a message, but don’t fit in any of the other “My Contacts” categories, mostly “the noise” made up of newsletters, spam, automated or service emails, etc. We split your Email contacts into these 2 categories so you can better find who you’ve actually communicated with.

The middle column lists the contacts in that category, and displays a preview including their name, picture (when available), and small icons that now indicate which contact details have been captured, for instance, their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profiles as well as email addresses.

And finally, the right colum provides details for a highlighted individual contact, including a digest of their different profiles. You can click on any of the hyperlinked contact details to go directly to their profile page or compose a message. You can also click to see all the archived messages you’ve exchanged with them.

We hope those changes will streamline your use of the People Book. This is just the first step in reorganizing the functionality of the site, including adding filters for messages, so stay tuned for more improvements coming soon!

Our users frequently ask about the speed of messages showing up in Silentale, and request faster updates. In this age of real-time where we expect immediate results, we wanted to explain how Silentale works, and the benefits that provides.

Unlike real-time aggregators which collect messages from different sources and consolidate them right away into a single stream, Silentale takes the time to organize and add value to your conversations. Let me describe, in the very simple words of a marketing mom, how we do this.

New messages and contacts from your different accounts (gmail, twitter, facebook, etc.) are collected and fetched at regular time intervals into the Silentale back-end.

The system processes them, analyzing their source, date, contacts and content (including attachments), to index and display them in your personal account. This is done on a continuous basis, although we give priority to your latest exchanges. But we also go as far back in time as we can for each service, to provide a comprehensive history.

The beauty of indexing all this information, is that it lets Silentale safely store your data in a consolidated, structured archive, so that you can search and cross-reference your messages, contacts and attachments.

It sounds like a pretty simple process but trust me, it’s unbelievably complex and I can’t stop admiring our engineering team for making it so efficient and fluid. Think about how many messages you have, and the work involved to make each word, field, document, picture etc searchable for all of them!

Of course, this takes time and means you may wait a little before seeing your latest tweets in your timeline… But in the meantime, they will be properly linked to your related emails & contacts, indexed and searchable.

So, when you’re asking yourself why the message you exchanged seconds ago is not yet in Silentale, remember the good old rule: “Never let the urgent crowd out the important”.

So how many times have you thought to yourself: “dang…what was the name of that hotel in San Francisco someone recommended to me for Social Media Week last year? I can’t remember who it was, or how they sent me the hotel details….

And then you waste half an hour scrolling through hundreds of messages in your different emails accounts, trying to go back to last year tweets (but hey, they’re gone!), browsing your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts…. just to find a damn message or trace from that guy…

… if you haven’t already deleted his message!

This is where Silentale’s Search functionality can really save you time and aggravation: it allows you to search ALL your conversations at once!

Simply enter a name or keywords (for instance, “Hotel San Francisco”) in the “Search everything” bar on the upper right-hand corner of the screen, or in the box on the Search tab, and you’ll get a list of all the messages and contacts with those terms.

Another way to make your searches even faster is to add the Silentale Search plugin to your browser (works with Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7+).  Then you can find what you need straight from your search bar, without even having to go to your Silentale account.

Just one click lets you change from your normal search engine to doing a search of all your messages and contacts. Happy hunting!

To celebrate 4 months since launching our private beta and the beginning of an exciting new year, we’re giving every Silentale user 5 invites to share with their friends. Consider it a big “thank you” for trying out Silentale, and giving us an incredible amount of useful feedback and ideas on how we can improve.

To invite a friend, simply go to http://my.silentale.com/invites or click on the “Invite a friend” link in the upper right corner of your Silentale account.

Your account will keep track of who you’ve sent invitations to, and how many invites you have left that you can send. So go ahead and invite your friends, and remember that the quickest way to get more invites is to use the ones you’ve got. If you’re the lucky recipient of an invitation, you’ll receive an email with a link to claim it.

So thanks again for everything, and we hope Silentale will continue to help you, and your friends, to easily and quickly find what you need from all your messages and contacts! We wish you nothing but success for 2010.