Our users frequently ask about the speed of messages showing up in Silentale, and request faster updates. In this age of real-time where we expect immediate results, we wanted to explain how Silentale works, and the benefits that provides.

Unlike real-time aggregators which collect messages from different sources and consolidate them right away into a single stream, Silentale takes the time to organize and add value to your conversations. Let me describe, in the very simple words of a marketing mom, how we do this.

New messages and contacts from your different accounts (gmail, twitter, facebook, etc.) are collected and fetched at regular time intervals into the Silentale back-end.

The system processes them, analyzing their source, date, contacts and content (including attachments), to index and display them in your personal account. This is done on a continuous basis, although we give priority to your latest exchanges. But we also go as far back in time as we can for each service, to provide a comprehensive history.

The beauty of indexing all this information, is that it lets Silentale safely store your data in a consolidated, structured archive, so that you can search and cross-reference your messages, contacts and attachments.

It sounds like a pretty simple process but trust me, it’s unbelievably complex and I can’t stop admiring our engineering team for making it so efficient and fluid. Think about how many messages you have, and the work involved to make each word, field, document, picture etc searchable for all of them!

Of course, this takes time and means you may wait a little before seeing your latest tweets in your timeline… But in the meantime, they will be properly linked to your related emails & contacts, indexed and searchable.

So, when you’re asking yourself why the message you exchanged seconds ago is not yet in Silentale, remember the good old rule: “Never let the urgent crowd out the important”.