Highrise is the popular online CRM for small businesses made by 37Signals that helps SMEs organize the avalanche of information related to their customers and partners. It offers a straight-forward contact manager, the ability to create notes, provides tools for reminders, collaboration and follow-up. We’re very fond of everything 37signals and are avid Highrise users because of its emphasis on simplicity and ease-of-use.

More and more, business conversations are taking place across a huge variety of communication platforms, including professional but also personal channels. The number of small businesses actively using social media to attract new customers has doubled from 12 to 24% in the last year (Small Business Success Index, Feb 16, 2010). Today, it’s simply impossible to limit interactions to email only! Companies are increasingly using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other networks to promote their brand and products, and to manage relationships with existing customers.

So, we’re especially excited to announce that we’re adding Highrise Contacts to Silentale. It demonstrates our commitment to integrate with business solutions, and will provide professionals and small businesses with a unique tool to track their communications and relationships with prospects, customers and partners.

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!

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!