At the Web 2.0 Expo, Microsoft announced a new product from its FUSE Labs division: Spindex, a social tool to bring activity from sources like Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and of course Bing, together in one place. The official description says:
Spindex allows you to access and interact with your social networks, see trends from your friends, and see related info from Bing on literally everything you click on. Spindex proactively finds useful articles and information based on your interest in your friends’ messages and comments. It lets you find out more about the topics that your friends and feeds are talking about in one click – so you can jump into the conversation.
Make sense of your social overload, open your personalized Spindex page, and find out at a glance what topics are hot in your social world. You can also keep track of the things you are remembering via Evernote – right inside of your Spindex page. Spindex is not just a social reader – as you browse your friends’ updates, Spindex continually suggests related content from Bing – giving you better insight into the topics and trends spinning around you.
Will this be Microsoft’s version of Buzz? Buzz hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm at this point, so that might not even be the goal. It does look to be another option for social media enthusiasts who want to consolidate their social experiences into a central location. It’s not the first attempt at this, and it certainly won’t be the last. At least people have more options to choose from to suit their needs.
Perhaps the real question is whether this will truly be a good way to keep up with your social interactions or will it just be yet another thing to keep track of? Share your thoughts.
Spindex is only available as a preview to attendees of Web 2.0 at this point, but Microsoft says you can follow @spindexme on Twitter to see when it becomes widely available.