So.cl (pronounced as “social”) is one of Microsoft’s latest service offerings that began as an experiment and is currently still an experiment. It’s set up as a social network with a social search tool at its core where users type in a search term to get results in the form of videos, photos, websites, or news. These results can then be pulled into your feed and shared as well used to make a rich post made up of a mixture of all the different media types—creating a scrapbook-like response to queries. All searches made within So.cl are public by default, allowing other users to discover these rich posts that were created under similar searches. This makes posts a collaborative work and helps other users save their energy and learn things they hadn’t initially considered.
The So.cl system is more like Twitter as opposed to Facebook in the sense that users will have followers and those followed instead of a network of friends that they already know. The idea behind So.cl is that users can make new relationships based on similar interests and related searches. Users can sign in with either their Facebook or Windows Live account and allow So.cl to search their Facebook address book for friends that are already on So.cl. Users can even set it up so that whatever they post on So.cl will automatically be posted on their Facebook news feed as well.
You can visit www.so.cl to see the site for yourself.