New Technology 2011 Gadgets, Best Gadgets, Desktop Gadgets

(For PCWorld Pakistan)

It seems like Microsoft wants to go after its competitors really hard. Earlier, on 10 May 2012, Microsoft made its search engine, Bing, social by integrating it with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media websites. Now, Microsoft has officially launched an “experimental” social networking site called So.cl, which combines facets of social networking, search, and media sharing with a user interface resembling Google+.

The website is a project of Microsoft’s FUSE Labs, a division of Microsoft working on other research tools that compliment social networking sites like Facebook. So.cl was spotted back in November under the name Tulalip, but then, in December 2011, Microsoft officially announced it as a new way to learn for students. It was initially made available to students of the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University.

To use this network, you have to ether log-in with your Facebook ID or your Windows Live ID. Since it is only in its experimental stage, I would prefer you to use your Windows Live ID. Here is a brief run-through of the application.

After you have logged-in, you will be asked to choose interests from a set of categories and follow the most popular users on So.cl. This leads you to the home page where you can explore the best of So.cl.

Explore

On the explore page, you come across a variety of categories such as Food, Movies, Tech, Science, Startups, and other. If you click on one of the categories, a newsfeed for that particular category is displayed. This is basically the searches that people have made and posted to that category. The posts also shows a specific link when you your cursor on to it.

Feed

Moving on to the next tab in the left navigation bar is “Feed.” After selecting which categories to follow, So.cl populates your Feed with all the posts being posted to So.cl by every user. However, there is also an option to choose feed related to your interest or the persons you are following. Moreover, you can also talk to the So.cl’s users via conservations.

Post

In order to post something, you’ll have to search that thing via the bar top displaying message “What are you interested in?” So.cl uses Microsoft’s public Bing API, so you’ll get very similar results as you do through Bing search. You can post the desired result by clicking “Add to Post” at the bottom of each search result. Like on other social networks, you can like by clicking the smiley button, comment and share a user’s post. So.cl also includes a “riff” features that allows you to conduct the same search as that user, and a “tag” feature that lets you tag your posts and other users’ posts with specific interests.

Profile

The feather is rather similar to other social networking websites. It shows your name with the same picture you have in Windows Live and posts you have made where comments can be made.

Video Parties

Another feature of the service is called “Video Parties,” which appear to be Microsoft’s version of Google’s Hangouts. And similar to other social media websites, you can always comment on them and add videos to your list.

Interests

The last section on the left hand side is Interests. It basically highlights the interests you are following and displays their own separate pages. You can see posts from the other users that are following the same interest page.

It seems that So.cl is more than a tool for students at present. It’s unclear whether Microsoft is really trying to build its own social network like Google has done with Google+, or if this is really just a testing ground for social Bing features.

Anyways, do let us know about your experience with So.cl.

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