14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s So.cl (pronounced “social”) is a research project that became public back in December last year as a new means for students to connect to one another and collaborate on learning.
Coming from Microsoft’s FUSE Labs, the project materialized in the launch of a website that provided all the necessary tools for people to interact with one another.
At the time, Microsoft explained that So.cl was built on Bing search programming interfaces, and that its main purpose was to provide students interested in social media with new learning tools.
“With So.cl you can share your search and help others discover what they might be looking for. Fun commentary & discussions usually follow,” the company notes on the website.
Initially available for students at information and design schools at the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University, the social destination is now open for the general public.
All those who would like to find new interests and connect with people that share their hobbies can do so, it seems.
To get started, people will simply have to sign in using their Facebook or Windows Live account, and they will be sent an invitation to join the network.
So.cl was destined to put together social networking and search, in an attempt to provide people with the possibility to easily find and share web pages just as students usually do when they work together.
The social-search network also enables users to come up with rich posts through assembling montages of visual web content.
At the same time, So.cl was destined to offer new means of collaboration and interaction between people, through rich media sharing and via real-time sharing of videos capabilities.
According to Microsoft, the social media destination was not created to become a new social network on its own, but to provide people with a brand new perspective on what can result from putting together search and social networking.