Microsoft’s FUSE Labs

If you haven’t yet done so, be sure to check out Microsoft’s FUSE Labs (https://fuse.microsoft.com/). FUSE (Future Social Experiences) produces some pretty neat projects that deal with social, real-time and media-rich experiences.

Among their notable projects is Docs for Facebook , a tool that allows you to share Microsoft Office documents with your friends on Facebook. Think of it as SkyDrive with full Facebook integration. you can upload, create, view, edit and then share documents with your friends or even the world. As with SkyDrive, document editing is collaborative, which means that you and your friends can edit at the same time. If you have Microsoft Office installed, you can edit directly from your desktop instead of the browser.

Bing Twitter Maps is another cool project that allows you to see tweets directly from Bing maps. That is, the tweets that you see and post are in the context of a map and carry a story along with the place. If you are, for example, searching for a specific place or object on the map, you will be able to see real-time tweets in that specific area. All the standard options that you would expect including searching, filtering and embedding are all there. Be sure to check this project out and if you have a comment or a suggestion be sure to voice it.

FUSE even attacked the problem of solving classic crosswords. Team Crossword allows you to solve crossword puzzles with your friends. Simply start a session and invite your friends, or wait for random strangers to join you as well. You can even jump into an existing session and play with others around the world. Whatever you do, you now don’t need to ask anyone what the nine-letter movie title that start with “i” is.

Lili Cheng, General Manager of FUSE Labs, gives an insight into some of the other projects and how and why they are cool and unique.

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSnwK-ETNHE]

Be sure to head over to https://fuse.microsoft.com/ and check out all of their projects.