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.

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 Message history 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 Silentale Contacts, 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 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.

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!