Microsoft is building its own social-aggregation service that will pull feeds from a variety of online sources, including Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, and Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
The tool, called Spindex, is the product of Microsoft’s FUSE labs which was launched by Ray Ozzie last year with the goal of exploring the range of social-networking tools within Microsoft products.
As you increasingly tweet, post to Facebook, and capture ideas with tools like Evernote, we want to help you get the most out of your social activity
Spindex was unveiled at the Web 2.0 conference by Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE labs, who called it the company’s “impossible project”.
“One area we’ve been focused on lately is the personalisation of social computing,” said Cheng. “As you increasingly tweet, post to Facebook, and capture ideas with tools like Evernote, we want to help you get the most out of your social activity by exposing the right information, at the right time, in a way that’s meaningful.”
To that end, Spindex will provide personalised trending topics among your friends rather than simply presenting those of the world at large. It will also seek out related articles and information using Bing, offering a direct way to dig deeper into the issues being thrown up.
“We use smart technology to try to pull information to you about what people are saying,” said Cheng. “This is great, because I’ve got a lot of really smart, much hipper than I am friends, and they’re always talking about stuff I don’t understand.”
Spindex is currently in closed beta and requires a Microsoft Live account to access.
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