I’m a bit skeptical of the speculation that Tulalip, the social-leaning service Microsoft Research accidentally published this week at the URL socl.com, is the company’s foray into traditional social search or social networking. After all, Microsoft’s Bing has strong ties with Facebook, incorporating the social network into Bing search results, and already offers Twitter and Facebook search through bing.com/social.
But Tulalip, whatever it is, does seem to be centered around social networking in some way. According to screenshots (see below) from Fusible.com, which first spotted the landing page at socl.com Thursday before Microsoft took it down, Tulalip integrates with Facebook and Twitter, and has some sort of (non-operational) search box at the top.
The four letter domain socl.com would complement bing.com.” Tulalip could indeed be a search portal focused more on Facebook and Twitter results than your typical lines-of-text Web search – a social skin for Bing, if you will.
Cutting to the good bits, Socl is really about using Bing's sophisticated search and predictive algorithms as well as your friends' answers to answer your own search queries. The point is to get more refined searches that are likely more catered to your specific needs, instead of a general suggestion you'd get from regular Google or Bing.
As a secret research project, Socl lets you follow friends, post status updates or search query status updates, post notes on your feed, watch YouTube videos together and tag searches so you can keep tabs on topics you care about.
The downside is that Socl can't do "private messaging, replies @ people, and no private sharing options like Google+'s "Circles."
Like we've said before, the social network space is already super crowded. How people find time to manage their Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn networks is beyond me. Microsoft is planning a public release via invites.
So who wants another social network fix? Anybody?
THANK ME LATER.........
