When I was at Web 2.0 in San Francisco, I received an invitation to beta test a new project developed by Microsoft’s FUSE Labs. It’s called Spindex, a name that came from the idea behind the service, which explores your “Social Personal Index.”

I brushed off my old-school Hotmail account (since you need a Windows Live account to use Spindex) and entered in my Facebook and Twitter account information, as well as some RSS feeds. In one way, it’s an aggregator so you can see all of the updates from all of your networks in one place with the ability to filter them down (e.g. update the stream to just see the Twitter updates of people you follow). You can also make status updates directly from your dashboard so it’s easy to send something out to your Twitter followers, your Facebook friends or both simultaneously.

However, the FUSE Labs team made a point of telling everyone that Spindex is not just an aggregator. The real power of it is that it lets you see what your friends, family and network are talking about at any given moment, and you can also search your networks’ updates for any topic. So you’re really able to explore your topics of interest in the context of people you’ve trusted enough to be part of your (online) social circle.

The right side of the dashboard displays recently shared links, recent photos and news stories. You can also see your personal “trending” topics – this is what people in your community are talking about or sharing as opposed to something like Twitter’s trending topics which looks at all user activity. Mine is pretty boring since I follow or “like” a lot of social media or advertising people in order to stay on top of what’s going on in the industry. So I can count on “Facebook”, “Twitter” and “iPad” being trending topics for me.

When I search “iPad” from my trending terms, my stream filters to only show content where my network is talking about the iPad. If I scrolled down, after those posts would be public updates with that term. In the right side, Spindex shows me some articles that are relevant for that search term (powered by Bing, of course).

Or if I click on something from my stream, it updates the right side with relevant articles based on those keywords. For example, Spindex looked at this tweet about typography and returned more links to articles and sites about the same topic.

Or you can do a search for a term in the top search bar and it will return your friends’ tweets and status updates with that term and relevant articles (i.e. “wedding”).

I am still messing around with and getting used to Spindex (I didn’t even get into the subtrends feature!), but I am liking it so far. As more and more people adopt a more social way of being online – not just updates of what they’re doing or where they are but also sharing articles or sites that they find interesting – this is going to become an increasingly valuable tool. When you look for a recommendation for something, you probably reach out to your friends first; Spindex makes it easy to do so.