Recently showcased at LeWeb and profiled on Mashable, Microsoft Montage is a web-based application that takes your search terms and transforms them into a magazine-style page. The web app came out of Microsoft"s Fuse Labs and went live in the middle of November. Montage pulls information from Bing including news, images, twitter trends, maps, and videos. It also lets you customize your content by pulling information from an RSS feed, twitter account, or images and video from a specific url. All this disparate content can be pulled together into a single, media-rich page.
This media-rich page is presented in a widgetized and highly customizable grid layout. You can choose from several pre-defined layouts or modify the existing one by deleting items, moving items via drag & drop, and changing the content of each item. Once you have your layout and content complete, you can save the document to an online account, publish it to a unique URL, and share it with your Facebook and Twitter friends.
Montage is similar to Paper.li, a highly talked about magazine-style, social network aggregator. Paper.li takes status updates from your Twitter and Facebook feeds and presents them in a multi-page, newspaper-style layout. The web app lets you save your feeds as personalized newspapers that are updated at regular intervals. You can also share these self-created newspapers on Twitter and Facebook. While Montage lacks the updating feature of Paper.li, it offers customizable content from sources outside your social networks and is a promising start to a new way of consuming news.