Microsoft Unveils Socl Network with Focus on Images, Video and Captions
By David Tobia
December 7, 2012
December 7, 2012
Microsoft released its new social network called Socl on Tuesday, but VentureBeat suggests the site has “no clear purpose.”- Microsoft’s Fuse Labs research team originally designed the site to appeal to those with educational interests (i.e. design students), but then redesigned the site with a larger focus on helping people connect through shared interests.
- “Socl helps people find and share interesting Web pages by extending the search metaphor, create rich posts by assembling montages of visual Web content and provides rich media sharing and real time sharing of videos,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “We encourage users to reimagine how everyday communication and learning tools can be improved by researching, learning, and sharing in their everyday lives.”
- Socl in some ways emulates Pinterest’s concept of collecting pictures around a common interest or topic, but Socl “both simplifies and complicates” the process by bringing search into the equation, writes VentureBeat. Linking the interest to search helps users find pictures, but often users end up with “collages that look a lot like search results pages.”
- Socl also allows users to participate in online video viewing parties, but the feature amounts to little more than “a semi unique foil for Google+ Hangouts,” according to the post.
- “The overall aesthetic is quite appealing, but Socl strikes me as more novel than useful,” concludes the reviewer. “People do, as history instructs us, seem to get a kick out of novelty on the Web.”
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