Microsoft’s Future Social Experience Labs is trying something that has proven difficult to do: aggregate volumes of social media into one spot. Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE labs unveiled the tool at the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this week calling it – rightly – ‘the impossible project’. The new tool will launch an aggregation of social data to an extent that is not usually found in social network feed dashboards such as TweetDeck or Seesmic, as Spindex handles Facebook and Twitter as well as RSS, Evernote and Microsoft’s own Bing.
On the official Microsoft blog Cheng wrote that today’s social networks are powerful and compelling, but they are just the beginning of a broader transformation of the web. Cheng says that one area Fuse labs have focused on is the personalisation of social computing and that they would like to help you get exposed to the right information at the right time in a meaningful way. The challenge social media aggregation projects face are numerous, including the fact that the number of platforms individuals use has been shrinking and that it is mostly early adopters who end up with profiles on numerous platforms that truly need this level of integration.
Fuse labs was started last fall to study the emerging social experiences appearing on the web and to try and inform Microsoft’s approach to how we will work and play in the future, as the company tries to keep up with the latest in Web 2.0 technologies. Spindex is currently in technical preview and is only available to attendees of the Web 2.0 Expo.
