Last week, a friend of mine asked why someone would archive all their conversations. He said “I don’t want to save all my messages, what do I care about me texting “on my way home” to my wife?

Of course, not all messages are equal in value. A commercial exchange is certainly worth a lot more than a powerpoint about why men and women are inherently different (I just received this one).

But you can’t really tell which message is worthwhile to you… until you lose one! Danger/Sidekick users learned it the hard way. Thankfully, after a few days of screams and complaints by users to Microsoft, they were notified that most of their data may be recoverable. I guess that in the next few weeks, they will be actively looking for means to backup their communications.

It’s like in real life: it’s only when you miss something that you realize how important it was to you.

And to me, there are no disposable messages. Even the smallest one carries information that could become, in time, extremely valuable. For instance, you may archive a long chain of business emails while discarding a short hello from a friend and only realize later on that your friend’s message is the only piece of communication containing the address of another friend.

Besides content and attachments, everything may become valuable: it can be a name, an address, the time the message was sent, etc. and this doesn’t even address other aspects like legal purposes, where a simple email or text can be presented as an evidence.

But we manage so much data —1 Yootabyte according to Mike Butcher — on so many channels and devices… How can we keep everything? And most of all, how can we find, in this welter of archives, the exact piece of information we need?

It becomes more and more tedious to backup any single one of our accounts and run vertical searches to detect a specific name or reference. No wonder a survey we conducted in April’09 with GMI* found that more than 75% of connected users are afraid of losing or had previously experienced the loss of a message, a contact or an attachment.

This is exactly where Silentale comes in: capture every piece of a conversation, even the most insignificant one. And build a comprehensive and searchable archive, where you can locate whatever you want… in just a few clicks.

So then, there is no need to care about whether we should keep a message or not for future use, we got ‘em all!

* Silentale online survey conducted in April 2009 by GMI Market Research on 1,080 respondents in the United-States, UK, Brazil, France and the Netherlands

On Monday, the WSJ published an article proclaiming the end of the email era:

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.”

Following my comment on the WSJ article, I wanted to further develop here my interpretation of email losing out to social networking.

The shift described by WSJ is pretty similar to what has happened with traditional mail over the last decade. Email has almost completely taken over personal correspondence (letters, postcards) and in the last few years, it’s even started replacing paper invoices and statements. As a result, our physical mailboxes remain only occasionally used for wedding announcements and registered letters, and are (most of the time) stuffed with paper junk mail.

Real-time and social communication will certainly follow the same process, eating up quickly the personal and “spontaneous” part of email communication. Email is already “passé” for Generation Y and Z who find it “unfashionable and outdated”. Boston College even stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.

But three core characteristics of email should prevent its total cannibalization by social networks: it is traceable, “non alterable” and archivable, which is not the case for many social network messaging systems. As a result, I don’t see electronic invoices or serious documents transiting through Facebook, or even through Wave, where any of your contacts could modify them.

And then, there is spam… it will continue to occupy more space: just as email did not manage to make paper ads disappear from our physical mailboxes, Twitter and Facebook are a new playground for bulk marketers. Needless to say, it will become even harder to rise above the noise when you will have to deal with five or six different channels.

I agree with the WSJ though when they say that this shift toward social media promises to “profoundly rewrite the way we communicate”. What I foresee is that people will segment their communications across different media, according to their nature (personal vs. business, real-time  vs. asynchronous).

Maybe the surprisingly flattening stats of Facebook and Twitter in September are already a sign of users getting more picky about the channels they want to use. In the abundance of accounts and profiles, email will probably remain a “core or standard communication vehicule“. Think about it: even if students gave up email for communicating with their peers, they will still need it to shop online.

So in the end, we will communicate on several different channels, through several different devices. This will bring further efficiency as we will be using the tool best suited to our conversation, but it will also create new challenges as the quest for information, and just keeping track of all your contacts and communications, will become harder than ever in this fragmented environment.

This is why I am deeply convinced that Silentale, when building a searchable archive of all your digital conversations and contacts, is addressing a crucial and very fast growing need.

Picking an appropriate name for a startup is always tricky. We want to be original and fun, but above all, we need to be readable and memorable at first sight, especially since we aren’t Coca Cola and won’t have a 360° worldwide brand campaign!

Rules of thumb

Although not recent, the “rules of thumb” listed by Dharmesh Shah in his “startup name game” are still relevant:

1. The name should have unambiguous spelling

2. The name should be relatively short

3. The “.com” domain names should be available

4. The trademark should be available

5. The name should be somewhat descriptive of what the company does

6. The name should be easy to remember and convey some kind of clear “mental image”

“Silentale” is pretty good with rules #1 to 4: it is spelled as pronounced, it’s relatively short, it comes with a .com domain and it’s free of trademark.

But what about rules #5 & 6? What exactly does “Silentale” mean??? A lot of you have asked us that, so we thought we’d better spell it out!

Breaking down Silentale

Basically “Silentale” can be broken down into 2 parts: “Silent” + “tale”.

 
The “Silent” part of our name represents the fact that the service works automatically and quietly in the background, archiving and indexing all your messages and contacts, without you having to do anything or change your behaviour.

“Tale” highlights the fact that we present all of your conversations in a useful way so that you can piece together what you’ve discussed and with who.

Of course, this is our explanation and you’re free to have your own interpretation, like Digital Doctor, commenting on the “Inglorious Beta’rds” post:

Let us know what you think of the “Silentale” name!