Microsoft’s research hothouse FUSE Lab cooks up Spindex – a Web-based app to aggregate Twitter and Facebook updates plus RSS feeds into a single streamlined screen.
There’s always plenty of cool stuff going on behind the scenes at Microsoft HQ, especially in the company’s R&D divisions.
The latest project to see light of day, albeit still in an invite-only technical beta form, is a Web app which aggregates RSS feeds along with what Microsoft terms ‘social streams’ from Facebook and Twitter.
Called Spindex, the app pulls all those updates into a single screen but then goes a step beyond being a simple aggregator.
Spindex also identifies trending topics in the Twitter and Facebook updates of your friends rather than the social Web at large, so the list you see is personalised and more useful.
You can of course update your own status on Twitter and Facebook, while Bing stands ready to serve up search items related to the feed.
Spindex is built on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform and hails from the Future Social Experiences (FUSE) group, a social computing lab set up by Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie.
Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs, describes Spindex as an attempt to “make sense of your social overload”, and says it’s more of a personal newsreader tool rather than a “social inbox”.
Hopefully Spindex will exit the private test stage and be more broadly available later in the year.