Microsoft Rolls Out Spindex Project to Aggregate Social Streams

As social networks continue to grow at staggering rates, Microsoft (News - Alert)'s FUSE Labs unveiled its latest project that is aimed to help aggregate and streamline social streams to help users interact more efficiently.

According to FUSE Labs, Spindex allows users to access and interact with social networks, see trends from friends, and see related info from Bing on literally everything  they 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," according to FUSE Labs officials.

"Today's social networks are powerful and compelling, but they're just the beginning of a broader transformation that will likely change every aspect of the Web. One area we've been focused on lately is the personalization of social computing," blogged Lili Chen, general manager of Microsoft FUSE Labs. "Spindex, which we're making available in early technical preview form, aggregates your social streams (Facebook (News - Alert), Twitter, Bing, etc.), making it simple for you to find what's new, see personalized trending topics, and generally make the most of the time you spend being social on the Web."

Besides Microsoft, there have been other such attempts to aggregate social networks including Tweetdeck, Lifestream from AOL (News - Alert) and Digg, among others.

"Tweetdeck, which is my default tool on my Windows 7 notebook, my iPhone, and my iPad for working with Twitter is also capable of connecting with and posting to Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn - providing a fairly comprehensive interface for managing social networks," wrote PC World's Tony Bradley. "Lifestream, from AOL, also provides one-stop shopping for social networks including all of the ones from Tweetdeck, as well as Digg, YouTube (News - Alert), Flickr, and more."