FUSE Labs Montage Now Open to the Public

A new Microsoft Cloud-based experiment designed to allow users to create web mashups by blending together information and media content is now open to the public for testing.

Montage is another project from FUSE Labs, the team that brought you fascinating new perspectives over the web such as Project Emporia, Spindex, SocialGadgets, Bing Twitter, etc. but also desktop and Cloud applications including Kodu and Docs for Facebook.

With Montage, FUSE Labs is introducing an easy way for customers to put together visual montages of relevant web content related to a specific topic.

Already offered for private Beta testing, Montage is now open to the public, with all users invited to create their own web montages.

“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,” reads the description of the service.

“You can design your Montage around any topic you can imagine by adding content that pulls information from a variety of sources, including RSS feeds, Twitter, Bing News, and YouTube. Montage is an expression of you.”

In just a matter of seconds I managed to put together this Softpedia montage that I shared with the world.

FUSE Labs is offering montage authors complete control over their mashups with such options as share, delete, unpublish and edit.

“I’ve had early access and been playing for a few weeks and the best way I can explain it is a fast and easy way to build a magazine like interface for a topic you’re interested in – no code skills needed,” revealed Microsoft’s Steve Clayton.

“You can literally create something in 60 seconds or you can spend a little more time, tweaking the design and layout to get some impressive looking results.

“The panel below shows you the starter tools for creating a page and a new feature I just noticed they added is when you first enter a topic name, a default page is built for you.”

Also make sure to check out the video embedded below in order to get an idea of what the concept behind FUSE Labs’ Montage is.