Microsoft's Collage !!

Microsoft Introduces Montage, a new topic based web application!

Montage is an application newly introduced by Microsoft. It is a topic based web application.It  looks and feels a lot like a glossy magazine web or tablet app. It works by allowing the user to pick a keyword or two; the application then pulls data and content from a variety of media-rich and real-time sources, including YouTube, RSS feeds, Twitter and Bing News. . The content is then arranged on the page in a grid format — you get to choose the exact layout — for your own consumption and for sharing with others.

For example, we used the term “Technology” to create a Montage of our own. We picked a fairly standard web-magazine format, then we were able to customize each “widget” or compartment of the layout with a WYSIWYG editor. We added images, a Twitter term trend chart, news articles and more.

When the editing part was done, we were able to tag our visual scrapbook, share it with our Facebook and Twitter networks and then publish it to a unique web page.In light of our collective focus on web apps and tablet form factors lately, Montage strikes the right note at the right time.

However, we should note that (surprise, surprise) the app didn’t always play nicely with our recently acquired Chromebook and the Chrome web browser. And your visual scrapbook will only be as awesome as Montage’s sometimes-flawed understanding of your keywords.

Montage comes from Fuse Labs, a research-focused division of Microsoft that concentrates on social, real-time and rich-media experiences. Another cool Fuse project we liked a lot was Kodu, an experimental, visual game-programming platform designed with kids in mind.

Visit Montage !!