If you think you’re already suffering from information overload, or feeling bombarded with emails, texts, instant messages, documents, pictures, videos, tweets, wall posts, blog comments… think again!

This week, there was a fascinating study published measuring & forecasting the huge amount of digital information created, copied and stored. It was the fourth update to IDC’s report The Digital Universe, sponsored by EMC, and had some pretty spectacular predictions that we just had to share.

Digital output has only been around since the 20th century, but we have globally already created 800 billion gigabytes, or 0.8 zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes). This is the equivalent of:

• a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back,
• all the information that could be stored on 75 billion 16 GB iPads (enough to fill Wembley stadium 41x),
• everyone on the planet tweeting constantly for 100 straight years.

The Guardian’s coverage has the biggest jaw-dropper: “By way of stark contrast between the output of present day humanity and its pre-digital predecessor, experts estimate that all human language used since the dawn of time would take up about 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form, which is less than 1% of the digital content created since someone first switched on a computer.”

This is forecast to grow to 1.2 zettabytes in 2010, and to over 35 zettabytes by 2020… a whopping 44x the level of today in 10 short years.

In the meantime, Intel estimates that by 2015 the world will have 15 billion connected devices up from 5 billion now. And Ericsson predicts that mobile data traffic will grow more than 50 times compared with today’s.

Surprisingly, 70% of digital content is created by individuals vs. businesses: every time someone types an email, takes a digital photo, or sends a tweet, whether from home, work, or on the go.

And on top of it all, with the continued consumerization of the workplace, individuals will become more & more responsible for managing their own data. Yikes!

To cope with this Mount Everest of digital output, new tools will be required for:

• Search & Discovery: how will we ever find anything? We’ll need solutions to index and structure all this data, including metadata (or tags) to identify each piece of digital content, and make it easy to search and retrieve.
• Information Management: how do we know what to keep? We’ll need ways to classify and prioritze all this information, so we’ll know what’s important, how to quickly access the important stuff, and the ability to get rid of the rest.
• Storage: and where do we keep it all? More than 1/3 of all this digital content will be created, stored and manipulated in the Cloud, ie-available over a network, with pay-as-you-go billing, and end-user control.

This new digital era obviously raises incredible challenges but also creates unmatched opportunities. This is why Silentale is excited to help provide a solution to store and organize all your digital communications, so you can find and manage this part of your information overload more efficiently. Ambitious? Absolutely! Especially given the zillions messages we’re all going to apparently send & receive in the next 10 years.

So get ready….cuz here it comes!

We’re super happy! Yesterday, we learned that we’ve been selected as a finalist for the App Star Awards, and it wasn’t an April’s fool joke!!!

After loads of requests from our users (and because we needed it too!), we have been working like crazy to build Silentale for iPhone. The app gives you an instant overview of all your contacts, plus their latest messages, when you’re on the go.

Although it’s not yet in the App Store, it will be shortly… we’re just putting the finishing touches to it. Make sure to have a Silentale account to be notified of it’s availability! In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak while you’re waiting…

Eager to have it on your mobile? Like what you see? Help us out by giving it the thumbs-up rating on video2.appsfire.com.

And for more on the Awards, check out yesterday’s post by ReadWriteWeb:

“The App Star Awards is a contest that highlights brilliant and innovative upcoming applications for the iPhone (and now the iPad, too).

Created by AppsFire, the service for sharing iPhone applications, the event draws submissions from all over the world.

This year’s group, for example, included over 80 unreleased applications from 20 different countries including Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Spain and Italy, in addition to the U.S.

The finalists, 33 in total, have been broken down into three main categories: “Games,” “Utility and Other,” and “Entertainment and Fun.” As part of the jury for this contest, we got a first look at some of the apps. Some early standouts are below.”

And Silentale for iPhone is the first finalist listed! We’re so proud!

Next up – the uber-jury reviews all the finalists to pick the winners, who will be announced on stage at 360iDev, the leading iPhone developer conference, on April 12th, in San Jose, CA. Wish us luck!

As mentioned by Steve Reeves, two new terms are literally “exploding” in the social media sphere – Personal CRM and Social CRM.

You’ll find these concepts heavily discussed on Twitter and Linkedin, inspiring expert reports like the one published by the Altimeter Group.

And the world got even crazier when Gartner released a study presenting social media as a disruptive force in the CRM market and predicting over 80% growth in enterprise use of social networking tools, driven by customer engagement projects.

No wonder Erick Schonfeld included Social Media in TechCrunch Ten Technologies that will rock 2010…

But what exactly are Social CRM and Personal CRM?

Like Frédérique Garzon I think the concept is too immature to be generalized and precisely defined, altough I like Paul Greenberg’s tweetable definition “The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation”, which is vague enough to let everyone have their own interpretation.

Everything that more or less refers to the notion of dealing with customers, managing contacts and leads, having and listening to conversations, all on social media channels, can be considered as Social CRM.

As a result, new services are released every day, all of them claiming to be “social CRM” solutions although they address a great variety of requirements, as illustrated by Jeremy Owyang’s list of companies providing social CRM offerings. Jeremy identified not less than 8 different categories of social CRM companies! Needless to say it must be very very hard for social media rookies to pick which solution is for best them…

And the difference is…?

IMHO the difference  refers to the ultimate end-user: is the service used by just one individual to manage their personal relationships (Personal CRM), or by multiple users at a single organization on a shared network (Social CRM)? But even that is not totally satisfactory, as you can imagine some crossover between the two. There seems to be two segments arising in the marketplace today: one focused on servicing professionals and small teams/businesses, as opposed to the classic CRM vendors targeting larger organizations. But both are providing the ability to listen, monitor and engage contacts/customers on social networks, as well as other forms of communication. It will be interesting to see how the space shakes out and becomes further defined moving forward.

So, what is at stake?

Social/Personal CRM usage is meant to soar, due to a number of converging trends, and not only because of social media rising as a powerful acquisition, branding and support channel. Other accelerating factors are:

• Consumerization of technology: business applications are more affordable, easier to use, and to adopt.
• Increasing individual buy-in: in February, Gartner claimed that business-led social media initiatives had a greater chance of succeeding than those spearheaded by IT departments,  because the latter doesn’t currently have the right skill set in place to design and deliver such offerings, combined with a lack of suitable methodologies, technologies and tools to help them.
• Cloud and Mobility: personal data is now available on multiple devices: netbook, laptop, slate, tablet, phone, console, etc.
• People as a Platform: people have multiple profiles, and belong to formal as well as virtual groups.

But both providers and users of Social CRM need to be careful in their strategy: like Michael Maoz of Gartner says “Social CRM is more like marriage than dating”.

Very interesting changes in the way businesses interact with their customers, prospects and partners are happening, maybe even a fundamental shift from a “transaction” to a “relationship” approach. Looking forward to seeing how all this plays out.

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!

Hunting down that elusive message or finding a contact, especially with only partial information, is always a time-consuming pain-in-the-neck. Silentale helps speed things up by searching across all your conversations and contacts at once (see our previous post), so at least you don’t have to remember whether the message was via Twitter, email, Facebook, etc.

But you can make your searches on Silentale even more efficient by using the following handy                                                                           operators:

We plan to add more search operators in future, so email any favorites you’d like us to add to support@silentale.com.

Another useful tip: when you remember who you had a conversation with, but just not where, you can narrow your search by messages exchanged with just one contact. Simply go to your People Book, search for and select the correct contact, click on the messages exchanged, and enter your search term in the box on the right.

Then you can view those messages in the side bar, or click to view full-screen.

So there you have it – some search tips to help you find what you need faster on Silentale. You might also want to check out our Search Plugin to enable quick searches directly from your browser bar. Next up at your request: searching by message source!

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.