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.

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!

After loads of requests, we’re happy to announce the release of our LinkedIn contacts connector, thanks to their recent API release.

From now on, you can see your contacts’ LinkedIn profiles next to their email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook and Twitter profiles, all in one unified and constantly updated view.

To add your LinkedIn contacts, just go to your Connectors page, click on “Add” next to LinkedIn contacts under the “Add a Connector” section on the right, and authorise your LinkedIn account (via Oauth), or just click here to go directly there.

Then go to your People Book and check out all your contacts with the LinkedIn icon!

Plus you can find all the information you’ve tracked about your Linkedin connections by entering his/her name in the “search everything” field.

This should be particularly useful for those of you who interact with a large business network. You no longer have to browse your address book, hunt through your email folders, or explore the twitter galaxy to check if or how you know this Linkedin person. With Silentale, you’ll know it instantly.

And another bonus is you no longer have a tedious search or synchronization process to consolidate your contacts’ details with their Linkedin profile. Silentale does it automatically for you.

Let us know what you think, and feel free to spread the word.

p.s. we know you also want LinkedIn messages, please lobby LinkedIn to open their API!

On the eve of LeWeb09, we wanted to give you an update about everything that’s happened in the last year since we won the People’s Choice award at LeWeb08, and what we’ve learned while doing it. It was a great conference, and where Silentale was unveiled for the first time, which really helped us to kick off our launch.

In the last year we’ve accomplished a lot, and learned even more:

• a great team can do great things (even if small): we added some world-class folks to the team, both experienced managers with a track record of rolling out new products at brands like Netscape, ComScore, AOL, Orange, BSkyB and Yahoo!, and even more importantly some great young development talent. We’d love to have even more folks on the team, but if you have to have just a few, they gotta be great.
• it’s lonely being the only one at the dance: when you’re launching a new service that can’t be compared to anything, it really helps to have other entrants in the same or similar space for people to reference, or growth in the general space you’re operating in.  The launch of Threadsy, MessageBunker, the impending arrival of Raindrop, and indirectly even GoogleWave demonstrates that there are others looking at a similar market. Plus the obscene growth and fragmentation of real-time communications helps demonstrate the need for a service that consolidates and archives all your conversations and contacts.  And it doesn’t hurt that we’re in the Cloud either…allowing users to access that information where they need to.
• meeting and talking to people gives great ideas: we attended as many events as we could on our travel budget, and met /engaged with as many people as we could (keeping dry mouth at bay with copious amounts of lubrication)…everyone from respected investors to journalists/bloggers, other startups, suppliers, potential partners etc. We can’t tell you how invaluable it is to not live in a silo, but to get feedback, share best practices and brainstorm ideas with as many folks as possible.  Trends start to emerge that you might otherwise have never thought of on your own…no matter how great a team you have.  Great events we participated in from 2009 include: Plugg, The Next Web, Web 2.0 Berlin & SF, various TechCrunch meetups, OpenCoffee Club, Nordic Venture Forum, Ignite Paris and Geeks on a Plane.
• users really are king: in the same vein, we’ve tried to listen to our users as much as possible, by conducting market research, conducting polls, and reviewing feedback from the site as well as tweets, blogpost comments etc., and use their comments to prioritize our development and improve the service.
• there is nothing better than launching: we launched our Private Beta on 8 September, and we can’t emphasize enough how much it helps to just get your product out there and start getting all that great feedback from your real (and royal) users, so you can iterate and improve your product to truly meet their needs.
• social media saves the day: being lean means $0 marketing budget, in whatever currency you care to count, but the community on the web means you can get the word out without having to spend. If you have a decent product, engage with the community and respond to feedback, you can grow.
• lean is HARD, but sharpens your focus:  you never have as many resources as you want; whether you work for a 5K employee company or with a handful of people, so prioritization of product development and everything else is key. Re: fundraising, we have learned that you need to have a) a sufficiently decent-sized user base (still wish someone could tell us what the magic number is), plus growth of that base going in the right direction, and b) ability to demonstrate that your business model will work, before you get any serious funding. Sort of a Catch-22, since you need the funding before you start to make money…but we get it. Heard loud & clear. Did we mention that we love our angels?
• scaling on a large scale is REALLY hard: our dev team worked their butts off building a process that can adequately scale to both process and store tens of millions of messages and contacts. We now have more sympathy for sites that sometimes have FailWhales during growth.
• tools of the trade make it possible: we’re operating at a great moment, where there are so many inexpensive tools and open platforms available, without which it would be impossible for us to function. You name it: customer support (Zendesk), surveys (PollDaddy & SurveyMonkey), email marketing tools (CampaignMonitor), databases (MongoDB, MySQL), cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services), collaboration (Yammer, Highrise and Box.net), marketing (HubSpot Marketing Tools), analytics (Google, bit.ly)…the list goes on and on, and we are grateful.
• going global is not a choice, it’s mandatory: altho our HQ is in Paris, our team of 8 represents 5 different nationalities (some with 2 or 3 each!), and we believe that to be truly successful, we have to be global. Our current beta users come from 57 different countries, and we have deliberately launched in English only initially to cater to the broadest possible audience. This may seem slightly controversial, and there can certainly be successful companies that cater for just one particular market, but if your ultimate goal is to compete on a global level, you have to prepare for that from Day 1.
• we get high off of buzz: we try not to obsess about it too much, and look at all feedback as good feedback whether positive or negative, but we do really get a buzz from positive buzz. As a startup, you hit so many walls, its important to get your high where you can! Anything from being called “Europe’s Hottest Startup?” in TechDigest (even with the “?”!) to a user tweeting “Everyone check out Silentale!!! F***ing great!” (thanks @harmen_h) really keeps us going.

So thanks again to LeWeb for providing the startup competition as a launchpad and showcase for startups in Europe.  We hope you all have a super and productive conference this year, whether you are attending in person, or watching from “home”. We’ll be at the conference and the events handing out beta invitations, so come say hello and grab one! We are also celebrating our 1 year anniversary by giving away 365 invites using the code HAPPYBDAY…just click here while supplies last.

We wanted to share what some of our users from all over the world have said about why they like Silentale…maybe it will even give you some ideas about how you can use the service!  We love to get feedback, and really appreciate that folks can see the big picture while we’re still in private beta and working out the kinks.  Thanks everyone!

Translated as best we can from Portuguese: “Silentale is ideal to track and store conversations.  Excellent for information management.”

And translation from German: “Silentale is cool, all your conversations from Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Hotmail or POP3/IMAP emails merged into one Timeline.“

We hope you’ll keep sending us feedback, comments, and suggestions by Twitter, Facebook or directly!

“The human brain has an enormous capacity to process information, but is distracted from being constantly bombarded by all your senses all at once. Every second, the eye’s retina sends ten one-million point images. At the same time, your ear drums pass sound information real-time at higher-than-CD quality. If a normal higher-end computer was fed with the information from a human’s 5 senses constantly, and asked to process and react to them, the computer would overload from too much information because it can’t react as fast as the brain could.”
- Extract from Man vs Machine, CVB.net, Thinkquest

However, because the brain is overloaded with all this sensory data, as well as having to direct all your bodily functions like breathing, pumping blood, walking down the street…it’s distracted just a bit when it comes to processing other information. Throughout the digital age, there has been a trend towards aggregating or consolidating information, to make it easier for us mere mortals to avoid being lost in the overwhelming amount of information flying at us every day.

Since the 90s, there seem to have been the following phases of aggregation on the internet:

1. Search
   Starting with “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” which hand-selected the best web-sites and grouped them into categories, right up to Google’s algorithmic ranking, Search categorization has been critical for users to find what they need. And now, the web has become so rich and complex, that virtually every site and service has its own vertical search (Twitter, The New York Times etc), and search alone is not enough: rankings, tagging, bookmarking, and other methods of filtering are required.
2. eCommerce
   The net allowed consumers to buy products direct, without the pain and aggravation of having to physically visit a store, but at the same time the choice became overwhelming. Shopping “portals” like Amazon, Kelkoo, Expedia and eBay sprang up to compile goods and services by category, providing a virtually exhaustive selection of items. These marketplaces further evolved to include comprehensive product information, reviews, pricing comparisons and discounts, and to allow small businesses and individuals to add their offerings to their online malls.
3. Content
   As the amount of news, photos, music and video expanded exponentially online, sites or services that syndicated and organized this content became increasingly useful and popular, including Yahoo! News, Flickr, iTunes and YouTube. And users are now able to setup personalized pages that combine the best of their favorite feeds to get an overall snapshot of what’s happening in the world. Examples include iGoogle, NetVibes, plus Goojet and Viigo for mobile.
4. Lifestreaming
   Now that social media is the second highest category for time spent online, tripling in 1 year, there is an urgent need for sites that consolidate updates from all your friends and contacts without having to go check several sources, and to update your own networks from one place. FriendFeed, cliqset and ping.fm have started to fill the gap. In addition, as some services like Twitter have taken off, there are new services to help organize the volume of data flowing through them, like Tweetdeck, Seesmic, and of course the just launched…Twitter lists.

   And now, there seems to be a new wave of aggregation:

5. Communication
   There are a lot of buzz words currently flying around to describe this, including ‘enhanced inbox’ and ‘unified messaging’. But the idea is to consolidate all of someone’s communications to make it easier to find your messages and contacts, and a bunch of startups are springing up to attack this space. Some are to trying to work within existing email to add additional messaging/info like Xobni and Gist. And the other subcategory is focused on combining all of your communication services and social networks, like Threadsy, Raindrop…and of course, Silentale.

In the past, the winners in the aggregation game have been the players that have provided the best service in terms of both quantity and quality, with the largest number of feeds (including the most popular sources of content), plus the best presentation and usability of those feeds, and tools/functionality around them. The most popular services are also open, allowing external development and easy access. It will be interesting to see which winners emerge in the Communication space for the aggregation of messages and contacts.

Flickr image by @jakekrohn