As of today, Silentale comes in two flavors, free and premium.

• Our “Starter” plan gives you the essentials of Silentale for free: unlimited backup of up to five accounts, including the import of 6 months of message history;

• Our “Pro”  and “Pro Plus” plans at $49 and $99/year allow you to track up to 10 or 20 accounts and import either 2 years worth or your complete message history.

All the plans & pricing details can be found on our website.

Introducing paid offers was a natural step forward for Silentale. From the beginning, we chose to be advertising-free, because the privacy and security of your data is paramount. And charging customers in a market where almost everything is for free can be pretty challenging… but recent events have reinforced how important it is for us to feel safe and comfortable about where our data is stored and how much control we have over it.

With Silentale, the answer is simple. Your archive is securely stored on Amazon Web Services, the leading provider of Cloud storage. Your data is never shared or made public. And we don’t ask you to connect with others. It’s your own personal backup of your contacts & conversations.

Our paid plans are comparable to other backup services in the market, even though we believe being able to access and search your archive whenever you want is a really valuable extra feature. But storing all those contacts & messages does have a price. We’ve tried to make our offer as attractive as possible by including a free option, and only charging customers who are storing the most data.

So signup now and try us out for free!

We’re very excited to announce our public beta launch! As of today, anyone can signup for free at Silentale, and accounts created by the end of May can add an unlimited number of services to track (see more below).

Silentale is one convenient place to backup all of your communication channels, letting you search across your consolidated contacts & messages to easily find what you need. It’s like Dropbox for communications… the first totally accessible archive for your digital conversations.

What have we been up to?

Since we launched our private beta last September, we’ve been focused on getting the basics right. Mostly, we’ve been talking/listening to our users…figuring out what they like (and don’t like!), and what they really want us to add, to make managing their contacts & communications easier. A BIG thank you to everyone who has provided feedback, whether via our satisfaction or other surveys, in one-to-one conversations, by sending a ticket on the site, or by email, twitter, and facebook – we really, really appreciate it.

We’ve also focused on a LOT on the backend. In fact, that’s probably what we’ve spent the most time doing on the development front. It’s tricky, because most of that work isn’t anything that you can point to and say “ta da… there it is!”, or that you would necessarily notice.

But for a service that consolidates and backups all your contacts & messages, that you can also access to search and manage your personal data, this is super important, and much harder than just displaying your messages to you in real-time. We have to be able to import your history as quickly & seamlessly as possible, and index it in a structured way so that you can easily find what you need.

Plus be able to scale so we can add lots of new users, and their millions of messages and contacts. We’re already processed 50m messages and 10m contacts… to give you an idea: that’s the equivalent of 1/10 of the US Library of Congress!

Here’s a list of all the new stuff we’ve rolled out since our private beta launch… you can read more about each on the links:

• Firefox Add-on v1.0: to let you quickly see contact details and the latest messages you’ve exchanged with someone across all the channels you’re tracking when you’re looking at an email from them, or when you’re browsing their profile on social networks.
• LinkedIn Contacts for a 360º view of your business connections
• Search Plugin to let you search your contacts & messages right from your browser search bar
• more powerful Search, thanks to a detailed structured database with loads of metadata behind-the-scenes.
• complete overhaul of Contacts (previously known as People Book) organized by source, and the ability to send them a message or see all the messages you’ve exchanged with them in just 1 click.
• Facebook Messages
• Highrise Contacts
• the ability to choose the Profile Picture for your contacts, which was also release as the open source Faces that other developers can use to grab avatars from multiple sources.
• open Data API to allow developers to build new applications and services leveraging Silentale’s infrastructure.

Next up

And there’s still a lot more to come, some of it coming very soon:

• messages by category, including newsletter/spam separation
• Firefox Add-on v2.0
• iPhone app (we were a finalist for the 2010 App Star Awards)
• Android app (being built by a 3rd party developer)
• Outlook plugin
• reply to messages
• contact editing
• CRM-like features, including notes, tags, metrics and more
• contact discovery
• even more open APIs for developers
• loads more services you can connect, including chat and SMS

Lock in your free account by the end of May!

We’re planning to introduce our paid plans on June 1, although there will still be a free version of Silentale for users who want to connect 5 or less services. So signup today to take advantage of our special promotion: all accounts created by the end of May will be locked in as free, and can connect as many services and import as much message history as they want before then!

So if you haven’t already, go signup now at silentale.com for your own personal CRM to keep track of & backup your contacts & conversations.

Note: Accounts created before May 31 will be grandfathered as free accounts, no matter how many services are connected or message history imported. After our paid plans are launched, these accounts will remain free, unless a customer wants to connect over 5 services.

One of the great things about social networks vs. email is that you normally get a photo of your contacts alongside their messages. It just makes it that much easier to quickly recognise who you’re talking to.

But not all contact lists are created equal, some of them are missing a profile picture, either because people want to remain anonymous or they just didn’t upload a photo.

Some of your contacts also possess multiple online personas, using serious portaits on professional networks, fun shots on social networks, cartoons, corporate logos and even sometimes a scene from a holiday snap!

A sample of my Facebook friends... Guess who's who?

And avatars can frequently change for events or causes, like adding a pink ribbon for the Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or turning green to show support for the Iranian protesters during the elections.

Choosing the best illustration to represent yourself has become a national sport, and you can find many articles on the net helping you avoid a taste mistake at best, and social suicide at worst, such as these posts on: How to Choose a Social Media Profile Picture and Avatar Importance.

Silentale builds your contacts’ profiles automatically from the people you’ve exchanged messages with, which means that in some cases, the profile pic initially retrieved is not always the one you’d most like to have in place. You don’t want to see your friend’s professional headshot, you’d rather have their smiling face from Facebook. Or you simply can’t stand someone’s avatar and have to change it.

Many of our users have requested the ability to choose the right photo from all the sources available to go along with the name.

So now you can! Simply select “Edit” on any contact and choose the “Change profile picture” option. All the various picture selections will be displayed, and you just click to choose your favorite.

It’s as easy as that! All your contacts, with the photos you choose.

Keep telling us what new features and functionality you’d like in Silentale by sending your feedback to support@silentale.com. We’re listening, so look out for more requested features coming soon!

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.

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 your Silentale Contacts. 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!

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.