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.

It’s been 4 months since our beta launch (whoohoo!), and we’re hoping that some of our users out there who have been testing the service for us, and already sending us great feedback, will help us out again by answering just 9 questions on a quick 5 minute survey.

We know that a lot of you really like Silentale, and we have some ideas of what features are most popular, but we’re really trying to narrow down what is most important to you, or “where is the LOVE”? Sean Ellis describes this in his interview with VentureHacks as identifying what users are the most passionate about and how they actually use the service. What part of Silentale can’t you live without? This will help us to refine our positioning, messaging, marketing and most importantly, focus and prioritization for product development.

While you take the survey, you can get in the mood by listening to the old school original version of “Where is the Love?” by Roberta Flack and Don Hathaway, or the more up-to-date song of the same title by The Black Eyed Peas!

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

After loads of requests, we’re happy to announce the release of our LinkedIn contacts connector, thanks to their recent API release.

From now on, you can see your contacts’ LinkedIn profiles next to their email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook and Twitter profiles, all in one unified and constantly updated view.

To add your LinkedIn contacts, just go to your Connectors page, click on “Add” next to LinkedIn contacts under the “Add a Connector” section on the right, and authorise your LinkedIn account (via Oauth), or just click here to go directly there.

Then go to your People Book and check out all your contacts with the LinkedIn icon!

Plus you can find all the information you’ve tracked about your Linkedin connections by entering his/her name in the “search everything” field.

This should be particularly useful for those of you who interact with a large business network. You no longer have to browse your address book, hunt through your email folders, or explore the twitter galaxy to check if or how you know this Linkedin person. With Silentale, you’ll know it instantly.

And another bonus is you no longer have a tedious search or synchronization process to consolidate your contacts’ details with their Linkedin profile. Silentale does it automatically for you.

Let us know what you think, and feel free to spread the word.

p.s. we know you also want LinkedIn messages, please lobby LinkedIn to open their API!

On the eve of LeWeb09, we wanted to give you an update about everything that’s happened in the last year since we won the People’s Choice award at LeWeb08, and what we’ve learned while doing it. It was a great conference, and where Silentale was unveiled for the first time, which really helped us to kick off our launch.

In the last year we’ve accomplished a lot, and learned even more:

• a great team can do great things (even if small): we added some world-class folks to the team, both experienced managers with a track record of rolling out new products at brands like Netscape, ComScore, AOL, Orange, BSkyB and Yahoo!, and even more importantly some great young development talent. We’d love to have even more folks on the team, but if you have to have just a few, they gotta be great.
• it’s lonely being the only one at the dance: when you’re launching a new service that can’t be compared to anything, it really helps to have other entrants in the same or similar space for people to reference, or growth in the general space you’re operating in.  The launch of Threadsy, MessageBunker, the impending arrival of Raindrop, and indirectly even GoogleWave demonstrates that there are others looking at a similar market. Plus the obscene growth and fragmentation of real-time communications helps demonstrate the need for a service that consolidates and archives all your conversations and contacts.  And it doesn’t hurt that we’re in the Cloud either…allowing users to access that information where they need to.
• meeting and talking to people gives great ideas: we attended as many events as we could on our travel budget, and met /engaged with as many people as we could (keeping dry mouth at bay with copious amounts of lubrication)…everyone from respected investors to journalists/bloggers, other startups, suppliers, potential partners etc. We can’t tell you how invaluable it is to not live in a silo, but to get feedback, share best practices and brainstorm ideas with as many folks as possible.  Trends start to emerge that you might otherwise have never thought of on your own…no matter how great a team you have.  Great events we participated in from 2009 include: Plugg, The Next Web, Web 2.0 Berlin & SF, various TechCrunch meetups, OpenCoffee Club, Nordic Venture Forum, Ignite Paris and Geeks on a Plane.
• users really are king: in the same vein, we’ve tried to listen to our users as much as possible, by conducting market research, conducting polls, and reviewing feedback from the site as well as tweets, blogpost comments etc., and use their comments to prioritize our development and improve the service.
• there is nothing better than launching: we launched our Private Beta on 8 September, and we can’t emphasize enough how much it helps to just get your product out there and start getting all that great feedback from your real (and royal) users, so you can iterate and improve your product to truly meet their needs.
• social media saves the day: being lean means $0 marketing budget, in whatever currency you care to count, but the community on the web means you can get the word out without having to spend. If you have a decent product, engage with the community and respond to feedback, you can grow.
• lean is HARD, but sharpens your focus:  you never have as many resources as you want; whether you work for a 5K employee company or with a handful of people, so prioritization of product development and everything else is key. Re: fundraising, we have learned that you need to have a) a sufficiently decent-sized user base (still wish someone could tell us what the magic number is), plus growth of that base going in the right direction, and b) ability to demonstrate that your business model will work, before you get any serious funding. Sort of a Catch-22, since you need the funding before you start to make money…but we get it. Heard loud & clear. Did we mention that we love our angels?
• scaling on a large scale is REALLY hard: our dev team worked their butts off building a process that can adequately scale to both process and store tens of millions of messages and contacts. We now have more sympathy for sites that sometimes have FailWhales during growth.
• tools of the trade make it possible: we’re operating at a great moment, where there are so many inexpensive tools and open platforms available, without which it would be impossible for us to function. You name it: customer support (Zendesk), surveys (PollDaddy & SurveyMonkey), email marketing tools (CampaignMonitor), databases (MongoDB, MySQL), cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services), collaboration (Yammer, Highrise and Box.net), marketing (HubSpot Marketing Tools), analytics (Google, bit.ly)…the list goes on and on, and we are grateful.
• going global is not a choice, it’s mandatory: altho our HQ is in Paris, our team of 8 represents 5 different nationalities (some with 2 or 3 each!), and we believe that to be truly successful, we have to be global. Our current beta users come from 57 different countries, and we have deliberately launched in English only initially to cater to the broadest possible audience. This may seem slightly controversial, and there can certainly be successful companies that cater for just one particular market, but if your ultimate goal is to compete on a global level, you have to prepare for that from Day 1.
• we get high off of buzz: we try not to obsess about it too much, and look at all feedback as good feedback whether positive or negative, but we do really get a buzz from positive buzz. As a startup, you hit so many walls, its important to get your high where you can! Anything from being called “Europe’s Hottest Startup?” in TechDigest (even with the “?”!) to a user tweeting “Everyone check out Silentale!!! F***ing great!” (thanks @harmen_h) really keeps us going.

So thanks again to LeWeb for providing the startup competition as a launchpad and showcase for startups in Europe.  We hope you all have a super and productive conference this year, whether you are attending in person, or watching from “home”. We’ll be at the conference and the events handing out beta invitations, so come say hello and grab one! We are also celebrating our 1 year anniversary by giving away 365 invites using the code HAPPYBDAY…just click here while supplies last.