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”.

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.

On Monday, the WSJ published an article proclaiming the end of the email era:

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.”

Following my comment on the WSJ article, I wanted to further develop here my interpretation of email losing out to social networking.

The shift described by WSJ is pretty similar to what has happened with traditional mail over the last decade. Email has almost completely taken over personal correspondence (letters, postcards) and in the last few years, it’s even started replacing paper invoices and statements. As a result, our physical mailboxes remain only occasionally used for wedding announcements and registered letters, and are (most of the time) stuffed with paper junk mail.

Real-time and social communication will certainly follow the same process, eating up quickly the personal and “spontaneous” part of email communication. Email is already “passé” for Generation Y and Z who find it “unfashionable and outdated”. Boston College even stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.

But three core characteristics of email should prevent its total cannibalization by social networks: it is traceable, “non alterable” and archivable, which is not the case for many social network messaging systems. As a result, I don’t see electronic invoices or serious documents transiting through Facebook, or even through Wave, where any of your contacts could modify them.

And then, there is spam… it will continue to occupy more space: just as email did not manage to make paper ads disappear from our physical mailboxes, Twitter and Facebook are a new playground for bulk marketers. Needless to say, it will become even harder to rise above the noise when you will have to deal with five or six different channels.

I agree with the WSJ though when they say that this shift toward social media promises to “profoundly rewrite the way we communicate”. What I foresee is that people will segment their communications across different media, according to their nature (personal vs. business, real-time  vs. asynchronous).

Maybe the surprisingly flattening stats of Facebook and Twitter in September are already a sign of users getting more picky about the channels they want to use. In the abundance of accounts and profiles, email will probably remain a “core or standard communication vehicule“. Think about it: even if students gave up email for communicating with their peers, they will still need it to shop online.

So in the end, we will communicate on several different channels, through several different devices. This will bring further efficiency as we will be using the tool best suited to our conversation, but it will also create new challenges as the quest for information, and just keeping track of all your contacts and communications, will become harder than ever in this fragmented environment.

This is why I am deeply convinced that Silentale, when building a searchable archive of all your digital conversations and contacts, is addressing a crucial and very fast growing need.

“What would happen if we could instantly access all the information we were exposed to throughout our lives?” says Bill Gates in the Foreword of Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel’s book “Total Recall“.

There’s been a lot of buzz around Gordon Bell’s recent interview in Business Week where he says that he has been recording every bit of his personal life over different devices for the past 10 years. And who’s talking? Bell is considered a “legend of computer science” and at 75 is still a Senior Researcher at Microsoft.

It’s true that no brain is capable of retaining the entire memory of a person. Unconsciously, our brain selects only the most important events to recall, and discards billions of pieces of extraneous information. In the same way, it is virtually impossible to keep up with all the content we create online and especially all the conversations.

Although I’m not sure everyone will be filming every moment of their day like Bell, there are facts no one can hide behind:

• 62.5% of Internet users belong to a social network;

• More than 1 billion photos are uploaded every month on Facebook;

• 33% of social networkers have uploaded video on their profile;

• and Twitter has had a growth of +1,928% from June ’08 to June ’09.

Is it, like Om Malik says, “an increasingly narcissistic phase, enabled by web technologies”?

Well, it goes beyond that for two reasons.

First, because there are real enablers:

• the shrinking cost of storage,

• the democratization of cloud computing,

• the capacity and features of mass market devices like wifi cameras or GPS phones,

• let’s not forget improved indexing, search techniques and data structuring,

• while Personalization and the Real-time web are being democratized.

Second, because it generates a measurable benefit. Lifelogging gives people and organizations faster access to their information without having to rely on any one device or location, and without having to remember to save/organize it beforehand. It will save tremendous time and energy and allow them to engage in creative/productive tasks.

Of course, a lot of people express concerns about privacy and the fact that collected data could be mis-used. But just a few years back, it was unimaginable to publicly post your status or vacation pictures! So, only the service providers who commit to the user’s data integrity and enforce it will manage to have a shot at being successful. It also probably means that new rules will have to be implemented at market and industry levels.

Esther Dyson, a technology commentator and one of Evernote’s board members (a company we are fans of!), predicts that markets will open for software to “extract order and meaning from the chaos of proliferating data.”

Here at Silentale, we want to be part of that (hi)story, by helping people to lifelog and search all their communications.

Flickr image by @nate