Spindex Me

NE google, catalog, useful, google, tweetree, twitter, twitter tweetree, NEWS • Comments (0)

Jun 04

Librarian Phil Bradley and industry analyst Stephen Arnold are two people who have found Microsoft's recent launch of social dashboard, Spindex to be of interest and potentially of some value. Both find the system's capacity to extracting trending topics from within a single user's social network to be a step forward in maximizing the value gained from social media. (As a comparison, Twitter can only generate trending topics based on what it knows of a user's local geographic position (if that's been turned on) or what it gleans from tweets worldwide.) I too have been playing with the system, but as an ordinary user, I'm not particularly enthused.

Spindex is positioned as the first system to fully index and make searchable posted content from those within an individual's personal social network. (See the introductory blog announcement here.) Hence the play on words in the site's domain, Spindex.me

The selling point from Microsoft's perspective is that the Spindex system offers the user a more efficient mechanism for extracting useful "signal" from the social "noise". The system acts as a personalized filter against the rush of activity streams. Since its introduction just about a month ago, Microsoft engineers have made further refinements. http://fuse.microsoft.com/projects-spindex.html

I have encountered no real bugs in using the system, but neither am I a particular fan.

For one thing, even for a closed beta, Spindex is slow in generating merged streams from my Twitter and Facebook contacts; in my experience, it can take five minutes or longer to display the indexed information. In an age where we're used to near real-time processing of tweets and updates, such latency seems excessive. It also represents the strongest argument against adding in any additional RSS feeds as the Microsoft site suggests users might wish to do.

Secondly, the dashboard (at least for me) offers no additional value in its displayed "slice and dice" of content generated by those within my network. Clicking on the photo avatar of one of the "top posters" in my network generates an implicit search of the individual's name against the Bing search tool. Search results may include the person's LinkedIn profile, various web sites associated with the individual, or even his or her blog. The value is supposed to be in seeing a a more complete rendition of that individual's activity, but if I'm already following that person via Twitter or Facebook, the chances are that I am already aware of his or her credentials.

Finally, the interface is not particularly intuitive. Just as one example, there are two buttons below each search item result (Share/Remember). Clicking on "Share" will post the item to Twitter, but I've yet to discover what happens when I click on "Remember". If the system is storing it for me, I can't find where and if the system is "remembering" the item for its own purposes in improving an algorithm to improve personalized results, there's nothing available to me as a user that explains that this is what is taking place.

Further insights are available from Venture Beat, CNet and BlackWeb2.0