Microsoft Fuse Labs beta launched an interesting new service today called Montage. Since I can’t say it any better than they did:
Montage is a flexible web-based service that makes it fun and easy to create and share a visual album of the web on the topics you care about. Montage is a shareable, personal, visual album of the web. You are able to design your personal Montage around a topic by adding content that pulls information from a variety of sources including, RSS feeds, Twitter, Bing News, YouTube, video and Bing Images. Your Montage is constantly evolving as you arrange each area with the content of your choice – which is easy, intuitive and fun; and can be on any topic from, movies, sports, to robots.
The service allows you to create a digital scrapbook page, curating a particular topic, as illustrated by this somewhat creepy YouTube video by Montage.
To start off, you enter a topic you want to create a Montage page on and you’ll receive a sample of suggested layouts with text, image, and video. You can cycle through the options and choose the perfect layout.
You can tweak a layout by adding additional rows or columns, or changing the content type of the panels. You can also modify the background image
A panel can contain Bing Twitter Maps, Text, Image, News, RSS Feed, Twitter Timeline, Twitter data, or Video from YouTube.
You can save, publish, and share your assembled Montage by signing in with a Twitter, Facebook, or MSN account. You can see the Auto-tune Montage page I made through an example while writing this article here.
There could be some interesting use cases for Montage but it will be interesting to see where the product goes to from here. You can also see other previously made and published Montage pages by visiting the Montage Gallery. Check out Montage for yourself at MyMontage.com.