The Microsoft Fuse Labs or Future Social Experiences Labs is a lab initiative by the company to create a space and a development team that pursues a common goal of developing, designing, and releasing new, futuristic applications and services that target and address the social nature of our everyday lives. FUSE labs aims to create ideas and initiatives that help people to connect and collaborate with what matters to the, be it people, information or ideas.
Some projects under FUSE are-
Montage
Docs for Facebook
Team Crossword
Project Emporia
Spindex
Kodu
Bing Twitter
Montage- Montage is your very own visual album of the web that is personal but also shareable at the same time. It gives you the option of designing your own personal Montage around any topic of your choice- for eg movies, sports, music or even robots. You get to add content that pulls information from various sources like RSS feeds, Twitter, Bing News and YouTube. The way Montage helps you to connect with the outer world is that it helps you to visually publish your content outward into the communities that you like and care for. Not only are you reaching out to people, but having fun along the way as well since you get the opportunity to use your imagination. Montages can be easily shared through Facebook and Twitter.
Docs for Facebook- Docs for Facebook is a sort of document service for the Facebook environment. It allows you to create and share Microsoft Office documents with your friends. You have total control whilst creating, editing and collaborating around these docs and also the decision of who you want to share these with lies completely with you. A doc can be started online too and you can take the help of a friend to maintain it or view it before you share it with the world.
Team Crossword- As the name suggests, Team Crossword is an application that allows you to solve crossword puzzles with your friends albeit online. You can start a puzzle and get friends or family to join and help you complete it. The advantage here is that you do not need to be at the same place at the same time, but still be a part of it. This makes the application very interactive and user friendly.
Project Emporia- Project Emporia is an application that scans through the vast world of social network updates and identifies hot stories, plus categorizes them into topics and ranks them too. This is really helpful and time saving as one can just go to topics that interest them and look for those updates rather than going through the whole stream of never ending updates.
Spindex- Spindex has all but one purpose. It helps to streamline information from all your social network pages like Facebook, Twitter and Bing and allows you to access it on one page. Based on your interests it goes out and proactively finds information and literally presents it in front of you. Helps you keep track of trends and hot topics of your social circle and even has something called Evernote that allows you to keep track of things you are trying to remember.
Kodu- With the help of Kodu one can design, build and play new games. The language used in the programming user interface is very simple and entirely based on icons. This language is designed for game development and provides an all out creative environment. This one is a big hit with the children as well as the little child in all adults.
Bing Twitter- Bing Twitter enables you to search through the vast information available on Twitter to find out what people are saying about topics that really are of your interest. Just enter the keyword of what topic you are looking for and you will get a list of the latest tweets that people have made on that. It saves time and is simple. Keep way of sorting out through the riff-raff and actually getting through to what you want.
Other than these projects there are also Bing Twitter Maps and Social Gadgets, the former allows one to see tweets in the context of a map and the latter visualizes real-time Twitter data that can be embedded onto a site or a blog.
Website: http://fuse.microsoft.com/