Let’s Be Curious...

I guess most of you haven't heard about the service Silentale - yet. My guess would be that it's because the service is still in beta and invite only. Fortunately I can do something about both these issues as I'm now going to tell you about Silentale and as I've got 20 invites to share!

Personally I've got accounts at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail and Hotmail. On each of these platforms I also got a number of contacts and a number of these contacts I'm even connected to through all these channels. This gives me a quite fragmented online life as each platform is totally disconnected from the others. One unified overview of all my written communication and my contacts would really make the online life a lot easier in many ways. This is where Silentale comes into play...

Silentale consolidates your contacts and conversations from multiple platforms, including webmails and social networks. It even stores it all in the Cloud and make you able to access it anytime, anywhere. Let's take a quick look at the features in Silentale:

The Connectors
The Connectors allow you to tell Silentale which address books, emails or social networks you want to monitor and archive. You simply select a service and provide your account details for all your messages, attachments and contacts to appear within Silentale.

The Timeline
The Timeline displays the complete history of all your messages, whatever their source or format, ranked in chronological order. It's like having a huge unified inbox across all my emails and social networks. With each message, the Timeline displays the date, the subject, the sender, the recipients and a small icon that indicates the format, e.g. email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can click on the relevant links to access the full message, the contact profile or attachments.

The People Book
The People Book displays a unified and exhaustive view of all the people you have been in touch with, whether they come from your address books, social networks or just because you were once involved in the same digital conversation. When I write unified you have to understand that it really does mean unified - Silentale matches my contacts across platforms and gives me a perfect overview of each of my contacts with data gathered from each of the platforms I've connected to Silentale - wauw!

The Conversation
If you want to follow all your conversations with one person, just click on the selected contact either in the People Book or the Timeline, or enter a name in the Search Box, and you will get the complete thread of your messages with that person, across all media.

The Search
The Search is a really cool way to get an overview of something. You just type your search words and Silentale shows you all your email, messages from social networks, contacts etc. matching the search in one unified view. This gives a very fast and efficient overview of your online communication. This is in my opinion one of the really strong features in Silentale and most likely the one feature that will actually make me use Silentale in my daily online life.

The Missing Features
Though Silentale really is a very promising new service I still miss a number of things:

• Text messages (SMS). I guess that around 20% of the written communication I get is as text messages so I really would love to have those in my Silentale overview as well. Laurent from Silentale has hinted that this will come in short term and on the Silentale site you find several places where they already mention SMS.
• Support for mobile devices. I got this great mobile device called an iPhone so I would really love to see a Silentale app on it too.
• Calendar support. All my appointments are in my Google Calendar so why not include those in the Silentale overview? They would fit perfectly in the timeline as well as in the People Book and I would be able to look up a person and see when we met, what we've communicated about and on which social networks I'm connected to the person. We already got the what (messages) and where (social networks, email addresses) so please also give us the when (calendar).
• Filter the Timeline. For now I can see all my communication in the Timeline but I'm not able to split up the communication by Connector - for example filter out the Twitter messages etc.
• Faster updates. For now the Silentale service only updates once an hour (with a few glitches) and it's in my opinion not fast enough in these busy times. I could live with once every 5 minutes or something but once an hour?

The Conclusion
Silentale is a very promising service - remember that it's still in a closed beta so things might not work 100% and it might not yet have all the features we could dream about. The Silentale crew is working hard on adding new features and the support is amongst the fastest I've yet encountered. Get these people hired at my cable company please! I try many new online services but I really think that this one is one of the ones that I will keep using.

How to get an invite
The friendly people at Silentale granted me 20 invites to hand out. If you'd like one of those please make a comment here - even "Please give me a Silentale invite" will do but I would love to see some "real" comments too :-)