“What would happen if we could instantly access all the information we were exposed to throughout our lives?” says Bill Gates in the Foreword of Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel’s book “Total Recall“.

There’s been a lot of buzz around Gordon Bell’s recent interview in Business Week where he says that he has been recording every bit of his personal life over different devices for the past 10 years. And who’s talking? Bell is considered a “legend of computer science” and at 75 is still a Senior Researcher at Microsoft.

It’s true that no brain is capable of retaining the entire memory of a person. Unconsciously, our brain selects only the most important events to recall, and discards billions of pieces of extraneous information. In the same way, it is virtually impossible to keep up with all the content we create online and especially all the conversations.

Although I’m not sure everyone will be filming every moment of their day like Bell, there are facts no one can hide behind:

• 62.5% of Internet users belong to a social network;

• More than 1 billion photos are uploaded every month on Facebook;

• 33% of social networkers have uploaded video on their profile;

• and Twitter has had a growth of +1,928% from June ’08 to June ’09.

Is it, like Om Malik says, “an increasingly narcissistic phase, enabled by web technologies”?

Well, it goes beyond that for two reasons.

First, because there are real enablers:

• the shrinking cost of storage,

• the democratization of cloud computing,

• the capacity and features of mass market devices like wifi cameras or GPS phones,

• let’s not forget improved indexing, search techniques and data structuring,

• while Personalization and the Real-time web are being democratized.

Second, because it generates a measurable benefit. Lifelogging gives people and organizations faster access to their information without having to rely on any one device or location, and without having to remember to save/organize it beforehand. It will save tremendous time and energy and allow them to engage in creative/productive tasks.

Of course, a lot of people express concerns about privacy and the fact that collected data could be mis-used. But just a few years back, it was unimaginable to publicly post your status or vacation pictures! So, only the service providers who commit to the user’s data integrity and enforce it will manage to have a shot at being successful. It also probably means that new rules will have to be implemented at market and industry levels.

Esther Dyson, a technology commentator and one of Evernote’s board members (a company we are fans of!), predicts that markets will open for software to “extract order and meaning from the chaos of proliferating data.”

Here at Silentale, we want to be part of that (hi)story, by helping people to lifelog and search all their communications.

Flickr image by @nate

Hey everyone – it’s been a hectic week since TechCrunch’s article about us last week…we were completely overwhelmed by the positive comments and tweets!  But we’re also very excited cuz it means that hopefully we’re on the right track, and that there’s a real need for the service out there.  There was also some followup coverage on FastCompany and GigaOm, which you can see from our Press page.

So now we are racing around like lunatics to send out invitations as fast as we can!  We’re doing this in batches to make sure we can ingest all those bytes from your thousands of messages… so please bear with us!  Getting the balance right between speed and scale is a bit tricky, but we are hoping to get through our entire waitlist in the next few weeks.

So watch your inbox for your personal invitation, and we look forward to welcoming you to Silentale!

Flickr image by @lorda

“My name is Lt. @lfp and I need me five techies. Five solid bug-busters. We’re gonna be dropped into the code, and once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin’ guerrilla army, we’re gonna be doing one thing and one thing only… killing bugs. Each and every man under my command owes me 100 pesky bugs fixed and I want my fixes!”

Yep, our tiny office could have been the scene of a Tarantino movie the last two weeks… six guys camping out in cramped conditions… stuck for hours… tension was at a maximum. The mission was critical… it was all about sweat, and guts… no one could breathe… surviving solely on Red Bull.

Heroic developers were hunting down those elusive bugs… hideously hiding in the deepest part of the code. We had to go beyond enemy lines, and we showed no mercy! We smashed every beta blocker we could find… and we’ve killed enough of them to forge ahead.

Just call us the Inglorious Beta’rds, we made it. Silentale is in Private Beta as of today!

Thanks to all those good fellas who have been patiently waiting for the war to be won… Email invitations will start rolling out this week, and we hope to catchup as quickly as we can.  And hey, if you haven’t joined the bandwagon yet, you can still do it.