Microsoft goes So.cl

Microsoft has announced its new experimental research project, So.cl (pronounced as Social), developed by the company’s FUSE labs. This social networking site integrates all your images, links and posts onto one to give you a collaborative and visually appealing update. For the brief time we used it; it seemed to be a mix of Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, which definitely means good news for the site and those wanting a new social experience. According to their  official Faq site:

• So.cl combines social networking and search, to help people find and share interesting web pages in the way students do when they work together.
• So.cl helps you create rich posts, by assembling montages of visual web content.
• To encourage interaction and collaboration, So.cl provides rich media sharing, and real time sharing of videos via “video parties.” 

Go social!

With So.cl it’s all about creating a nice montage of sorts, including pictures, links, quotes and assembling it all together onto one single post. There’s also an option called Video party that lets you and your friends and followers view movies and other content together. Users can view existing party collections by any other So.cl user or create their own. Chatting is available as well. All data on So.cl is public unless you mark it as private and can be viewed by all other So.cl users. This, according to them, is to enable new types of research and experimentation. So.cl uses Facebook authentication and you can choose if you want your content to appear in your Facebook stream. By default though, this feature has been disabled. With So.cl, a new bookmarklet has been included that is a new and easy way of sharing content on So.cl, while navigating the Web. 

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So.cl is a free website and it uses the search data via Bing’s public API, but it is not a Bing product. They do not plan to replace existing full features social networking tools with So.cl. Their plan is to create and develop an experimental research project using a minimal set of features for the purpose of learning. If you’ve not checked So.cl already, then click this link to see what it’s all about.