Silentale’s Bold Mission: Aggregate Your Digital Conversations and Contacts

Following TechCrunch’s announcement last week about a new start-up focused on reeling in all of your digital conversations, I wrote an article about communication and the invite-only private beta, put in my bid for an invitation and waited. This morning I received my invitation code for the Silentale private beta and could not wait to see what the folks across the big blue pond had put together.

All of Your Digital Conversations and Contacts in One Place

Silentale is a start-up company in France with a lofty mission: to help digitally connected people stay in control of their contacts and conversations, wherever and whenever they happen. In plain English, this means they want to give you the ability to aggregate most, if not all, of your digital conversations and contacts in one place.

That’s no small task.

This means aggregating emails from separate email accounts like Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail, stringing them together with your Facebook posts, your tweets on Twitter, sms text messages, Google IM chats, Skype IM… the list goes on. I’ve been pulling my hair out about this for years, trying to keep up with this identity over here, twittering over there (sorry, Oprah, I got there first), emails, texts. That invitation code could very well be my salvation. And I got right to it.

With my invitation code, I created a Username and Password – standard fare. I was surprised at the lack of integration with OpenID and no password checking (you know, enter your password twice to make sure you really know what your password is).

Once in, I was presented with an easy-to-understand user interface that helped me connect my disparate accounts with Silentale. The obvious options were right in front of me and I connected Facebook, Gmail, Google Contacts and Twitter to Silentale’s repository.

Making these connections was very easy and I think a lot of folks are going to be surprised at how easy it is to connect their different accounts.

Once I finished connecting my different channels of communication, I could hardly wait to see how Silentale would handle each channel. As promised, my emails, tweets and Facebook posts began appearing in Silentale’s Timeline, chronologically, with the latest appearing on top. What I like about this Timeline is the preview of each piece of communication. Who the message is from, the Subject, if any, and four decent lines of text from the body of the message are right there; that’s just enough for me to decide whether I need to expand the message or move on!

Now I wanted to find out how Silentale handled my Contacts.

The People Book: Silentale’s Contact Organizer

This is the coup d’etat (you know I could not resist that). I love the presentation of people on the left side of the screen with the alphabet running vertically along the length the screen right next to my Contacts. It reminds me of the metal address book The Man o’ the House has (except the alphabet is on the right side of his old-fashioned apparatus). Now, I can quickly jump to all of my contacts whose last name or first name begins with the letter “S” or who have “S” in their company name. That is a very handy browsing feature.

I thought at first it would help to make the letters of the alphabet a different color so that they stand out a little more. But after working with the user interface a bit more, I realized why the color is subtle and appreciated the forethought of whoever made that decision.

But can you merge?

Not only can you merge, but you can unmerge as well. And the merging interface is brilliant. What I liked is the ability to search multiple contacts to merge, instead of having to scroll through a list. Perform your search, a list of results pops up and you can pick and choose from that list. When you are finished finding contacts to merge, Silentale seamlessly merges your chosen contacts.

Into the Digital Conversation Age with Silentale

I worked with the Silentale product for most of the day today, using it as my primary source of communication information. It’s fast enough for my needs and I love the integration between my different communication channels. I will definitely be test-driving it in the days following.

There appears to be a lag between the time Gmail receives a message and that message appears in my Silentale account. As of right now, this amounts to a 45 minute delay. Because I use Gmail as my primary email for business and personal use, this is too much lag time for my hyper-control needs. I did notice that throughout the day, Silentale pulled in my contacts (1000+) and emails (4500+) and is still going.

I will work with it more into the evening, when most of my Facebook friends are posting to see how Silentale handles their posts and comments, messages, etc.

A big plus is the integration of SMS text. I’m looking forward to integrating the SMS text messages sent to my BlackBerry. I wonder if blog comments ala Intense Debate are slated for inclusion as well!

The key functionality for me is contact syncability. I am not able to add contacts to Silentale and I do not know if this is being considered (or if I even want this). It sure would be nice, though, if once I merged a contact in Silentale, Google Contacts could be updated. That would be “le cul du chat!”

All in all, Silentale delivers on its promise of digital communication integration. And I look forward to adding new connectors as they become available and running the Silentale app on my BlackBerry!