View Your Social World on One Page with Spindex

When I first visited the Spindex homepage, there was no explanation of the service, so I had no idea was it was about. As a matter of fact, besides the words “Spindex” and “Sign In”, there’s no other text on the page. So I was a bit leery about requesting an invite but it didn’t take long for me to see what was behind the mysterious homepage. Spindex is “your one stop shop for searchable access to your favorite social networks, RSS feeds, and more.”

Spindex is a project brought to you by the Microsoft Fuse Labs division. So, since it’s Microsoft, you of course log into the service using your Windows Live ID.

With Spindex you can connect your Twitter, Facebook and Evernote accounts. You can then add several RSS feeds that you want to keep up with as well. After doing so, click on “Return to Spindex” in the left hand column with start building your stream and then take you to your homepage. What you’re left with is a 3 column interface that showcases the best of your networks.

The left column is for your sources. This is where you can select which content to view in the middle column (which displays your stream). You can view all sources or just Evernote, Facebook, Twitter or your RSS feeds. “As you find content in Spindex that you like and want to keep track of, click on the Remember button and it will show up under the Spindex source on the left side of the page.”

The right column is where all info about your network is displayed. You can see trending topics within your network, recently shared links, top posters, most commented on posts, recent photos and more.

For each item you can do the basic actions that you would be able to do on the actual site. So for Facebook you can comment, like, share and remember (Spindex exclusive feature) an item. For Twitter you can reply, favorite, retweet, and remember an item. Replying is done inline, which is nice.

With RSS items you can share or remember each item. You’re only shown an except of each item; clicking on an item will take you to the actual site to view the whole post. It would be nice if you could mark an item as read in order to remove it from the stream, but that doesn’t seem to be possible at the moment.

You can also update your status at the top of the stream column. You can post it to one or all of your connected services. There is also a search box at the top of the page where you can search the web. Results are displayed in the right hand column. You can even save searches if it’s something that you search for often or want to keep up with.

What do you think? Does Spindex have potential? Will you use it?

Related Articles

• How to Create a FaceBook Landing Page for Your Blog
• Promote Your Blog With An Interview
• How To Get A Story To The Digg Front Page
• We want your help for a location-based social networking cage match!
• Getting in Gear with Social Media News