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