Microsoft opens its own social network

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/05/tech/social-media/microsoft-socl-social-network/index.html

by bretthellman • 14 years ago

26 49 14 years ago

mathattack• 14 years ago

I was scratching my head on this. Where's the buzz? What's this have that Google+ missed on?

stusmall• 14 years ago

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised too. I try to keep an eye out for these things and this is the first I've heard of it. It makes me wonder how serious they are about this.

simba-hiiipower• 14 years ago

it’s actually been around for a little while now. i remember first hearing of it about a year ago, and according to this [1] they launched a private beta back in december 2011

as for how serious they are, i’d say not really, at least in terms of building-out a viable network to compete with the likes of a facebook. i get the impression that it's more of a large-scale research effort with a focus on integrating social in a more meaningful way, particularly as it relates to search

i think this [from the source below] sums it up pretty well:

Microsoft officials have described Socl as a kind of mash-up of social-networking and search that is designed to get the learning communities to start thinking about how to use collaboration technologies in new ways. And according to the Softies and contrary to popular rumors, Socl is not an attempt to take on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler or Pinterest.

Socl combined ideas the FUSE Labs teams have pioneered in some of their other experimental projects, like Montage (a photo collage app) and Kodu (game programming). Microsoft built Socl using TypeScript, its superset of JavaScript.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-opens-its-socl-social-search-...

vitorarins• 14 years ago

It can show animated gifs??

laserDinosaur• 14 years ago

Sockel? Strange name.

navneetpandey• 14 years ago

What a waste

andreiursan2• 14 years ago

(One of) the first social network where you can sign in with Facebook.

nwh2• 14 years ago

MySpace offers the same, believe it or not.

fwr2• 14 years ago

The other one is Facebook.

andreiursan2• 14 years ago

Very disapointed that I cannot sign in with Google+

Timmy_C2• 14 years ago

After Friendster did their big redesign they added Facebook login too. I think that was about a year ago now.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

Why do one thing well, when you can do many things with tepid mediocrity?

Look what's happening to Microsoft's core business:

http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-2012-internet-tre...

EDIT: You won me over cooldeal. (robotic voice) Clippy is better than Google Now. I will start using Bing.

cooldeal4• 14 years ago

Why take the time to write an insightful comment on the actual news at hand when you can score brownie points with yet another knee jerk 'MS is dying' comment linking to blog spam that further links to one graph that somehow proves your point?

What about this news then? http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-8-overtakes-android-web-...

How does that fit in with the graph you posted?

Statistics are like bikinis, they hide more than what they reveal.

However, this being the top comment on this article says more than about HN than you.

k3n5• 14 years ago

You make an excellent point, because I don't trust those Win8 numbers at all.

muxxa• 14 years ago

The winbeta article you've linked to is a repost of this article: http://microsoft-news.com/windows-8-overtake-android-web-pre...

This completely ignores mobile android use! It's basically comparing desktop Android (Tablets) with Windows 8.

StatCounter doesn't publish web traffic os data across mobile and desktop, but if you look at overall mobile vs. desktop, it's 86.7% vs. 13.3% [1]

If you look at the data for the start of the graph:

Android has 31% of mobile [2] (0.133 * .31 = 0.041, or 4% of the overall mobile+desktop)

Android also has 0.64% of desktop [3] (0.867 * 0.0064 = 0.0055, or 0.5% of the overall)

So Android has 4.5% of Mobile + Desktop

While Win8 has 0.35% of desktop [3] (0.867 * 0.0035 = 0.003, or 0.35% overall)

so it's 4.5% for Android vs. 0.35% for Win8

For the end of the period in the graph, Win8 has risen to 0.71% or 0.61% overall (Android will have stayed the same at 4.5%).

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-daily-201210...

[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-daily-20121021-20121...

[3] http://gs.statcounter.com/chart.php?bar=1&statType_hidde...

jborden13• 14 years ago

Another "me-too" product from a once innovative tech titan (yes they still do innovate - just not on this).

fwr2• 14 years ago

> Welcome, you can create your own collage in seconds

What kind of headline is that?

eddmc• 14 years ago

Microsoft had a social network. It was called MSN Messenger.

Of course, they killed it

This effort looks like another Zune

sk55• 14 years ago

HN conversation when they released the beta: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3999671

theklub• 14 years ago

Don't they already have a social network with Xbox Live, ETC... seems like building off of that more would be the right move.

iso-8859-1• 14 years ago

The Live brand was retired: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live

They won't make launch anything that used to have that brand, people wouldn't use a product that was already discontinued.

Mutinix• 14 years ago

I'm genuinely curious to know when and where the trend of naming companies or products by removing the vowels or random letters from a word started from. I've seen it in a number of places. Why? Is it because if they use the full word, it becomes too general and difficult to associate?

mcdoh• 14 years ago

Or the domain name they were interested in is being squatted upon.

mbrubeck• 14 years ago

I believe the success of flickr.com (registered in 2003, launched in 2004) kicked off the current vogue for these names, though there are earlier examples too:

http://www.branddialogue.com/diablogue/2006/06/names-that-hu...

Misspelled words -- especially shortened ones -- have certain persistent advantages as names for web companies. It's easier to find available domains; it's a unique word for search engines; it's short and therefore quick to type.

Of course there are disadvantages too... Twitter was originally called "Twttr" when it launched in 2006, but later restored the vowels:

http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/

kaolinite• 14 years ago

I don't understand why they picked a really short domain "so.cl" and then redirect users to "www.so.cl" as soon as you hit it (which IMO looks kinda weird).

simonw2• 14 years ago

so.cl is a short enough domain that some browsers might forbid it from setting cookies, since it's the same length as .co.uk (and letting sites set cookies for the whole .co.uk space would be a massive privacy violation).

WizKid• 14 years ago

I thought browsers used http://publicsuffix.org/ and not length of domain names to do that.

nwh2• 14 years ago

While I see the point (and some TLD do have A records), I've never had issues setting cookies from two letter second level domains. At least with modem browsers that doesn't seem to be an issue.

freehunter• 14 years ago

I didn't dig around much to see if it has anything in the way of content filtering, but I loaded it up at work and was greeted with a page filled with scantily-clad ladies in suggestive poses. I work information security so I spend a decent amount of time evaluating risks associated with allowing certain sites at work and visiting random websites is not frowned upon for this reason, but as soon as I see suggestive materials I'm out of there.

Hey Microsoft, how about some content filtering turned on by default to hide potentially objectionable or NSFW materials? Also while I have your attention, why roll this out without any WP8 integration?

babblingdweeb• 14 years ago

Ditto for me.

"Above the fold" photos of severely/epic photoshopped boobs, etc. Scrolling a little further down I was greeted with photos of poop. Lots of them. I'll skip what there were photos of on the next page.

Suffice to say, I am sure there are a ton of Internet trolls taking advantage of the lack of filtering, and they want to make the site look bad. Hopefully MS can put some type of fix on that sooner than later. Otherwise, I assume some early adopters might be turned off just from going to the home page.

jwarzech• 14 years ago

They definitely need a better way to determine what content gets featured on the front page of their site.....the first image was a nsfw collection...

xionon• 14 years ago

Potential NSFW warning: When I visited http://beta.so.cl/, I got a big eyeful of the image from the old goatse.cx

(in case anyone doesn't know what that is, here's a sfw explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx)

lmkg• 14 years ago

This is a research project out of MSR, not a product out of Microsoft proper. I'm still not exactly sure what it is that they're researching ("social search"? ¯\(°_o)/¯), but it does make a lot more sense as an off-the-wall experiment than a finished corporate product.

http://www.so.cl/about

> Socl is a research project from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs...

adamnemecek• 14 years ago

Look into research of danah boyd who does this sort of research at MSR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danah_boyd)

Here are the names of her last 4 papers:

- "Networked Trafficking: Reflections on Technology and the Anti-Trafficking Movement."

- "Making Sense of Teen Life: Strategies for Capturing Ethnographic Data in a Networked Era."

- "The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare."

- "Sociality through Social Network Sites."

k3n5• 14 years ago

Oh look, a G+ clone...

MS is so inept at anything "social", it's sad they even keep trying (but I guess if you have enough monkeys banging away on a keyboard long enough, they'll eventually pound out the next FB "killer").

The Messenger+Live (aka. "Messenger social" from the site itself) is a comedy of errors -- has anyone signed into that recently? It's XP meets Vista meets Win8, but mostly just the annoying parts of each. And their "social forums"[1] are the worst forums that I've ever had the privilege of ignoring.

1. http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/

Timmy_C2• 14 years ago

Everyone agrees that we're going to call this "sock-el" right?

mrcharles2• 14 years ago

I can only view it as So-Chlorine.

mrcharles2• 14 years ago

Front page already has pages dedicated to porn stars and is borderline NSFW, if you were looking to check it out.

schrodinger• 14 years ago

Lotsa NSFW posts showing up when I tried it, careful...

vonuebelgarten• 14 years ago

So, is it an Apple Ping 2.0? Destined to the same fate, I suppose.

Microsoft opens its own social network

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