We’re happy to let you know that while we work on the finishing touches to launch our paid plans, there will be 2 more weeks to lock in a free account… until June 14th.

This means that your existing free account and everything you’ve imported and archived will remain in place, regardless of the number of services you’ve connected. We will not delete anything from your account.

We think our initial customers deserve to be grandfathered! Your account will continue to be free for as long as you’re with us. If you then decide to upgrade to one of our premium plans for additional features or to continue to add more services, it’s completely up to you.

Starting June 14, all new users can choose from the following plans:

• the Free Starter plan to connect 5 or less services & import 6 months of messages
• the $49/year Pro plan to track up to 10 services & import 2 years of messages
• the $99/year Pro Plus plan for up to 20 services & unlimited message import.

Launching our paid plans will allow us to cover the costs of storing all those messages & contacts, and we’re looking forward to becoming a “real” business.

So there’s still 2 weeks left to signup for Silentale and get your free account. If you have any friends who haven’t tried us out yet, tell them to sign up before June 14th while they can add & track as many services as they want for free.

Thanks to all our existing customers for their feedback & support!

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.

“My name is Lt. @lfp and I need me five techies. Five solid bug-busters. We’re gonna be dropped into the code, and once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin’ guerrilla army, we’re gonna be doing one thing and one thing only… killing bugs. Each and every man under my command owes me 100 pesky bugs fixed and I want my fixes!”

Yep, our tiny office could have been the scene of a Tarantino movie the last two weeks… six guys camping out in cramped conditions… stuck for hours… tension was at a maximum. The mission was critical… it was all about sweat, and guts… no one could breathe… surviving solely on Red Bull.

Heroic developers were hunting down those elusive bugs… hideously hiding in the deepest part of the code. We had to go beyond enemy lines, and we showed no mercy! We smashed every beta blocker we could find… and we’ve killed enough of them to forge ahead.

Just call us the Inglorious Beta’rds, we made it. Silentale is in Private Beta as of today!

Thanks to all those good fellas who have been patiently waiting for the war to be won… Email invitations will start rolling out this week, and we hope to catchup as quickly as we can.  And hey, if you haven’t joined the bandwagon yet, you can still do it.

So we’re getting ready to start sending out beta invitations after the summer holidays, and you can help us get ready faster by filling in this 6 question mini survey.

We’re really interested to hear from all you hyper-connected folks to better understand your needs for contact & message aggregation, storage and management. We’re also looking for feedback on which features and services we should prioritize for the next phase of our development.

Take the Silentale Beta Survey!

Of course, if you haven’t already requested an invitation, you can do it here by selecting “Signup for beta!”. And thanks to SurveyMonkey for their great service!