Microsoft Launched Social Network

And finally its open for all! Microsoft has launched So.cl (pronounced “social”), a social ‘network’ that ran in beta and was tested by university students in 2011.

•     So.cl combines social networking and search, to help people find and share interesting web pages in the way students do when they work together.
•     So.cl helps you create rich posts, by assembling montages of visual web content.
•     To encourage interaction and collaboration, So.cl provides rich media sharing, and real time sharing of videos via “video parties.”

Microsoft hope to encourage students to reimagine how our everyday communication and learning tools can be improved, by researching, learning and sharing in their everyday lives.

The So.cl search experience is powered by Bing; it uses the public Bing APIs to display search result data. As students work together, they often look for the same content, and discover new shared interests by sharing results. These results can be web pages, images, or videos found through Bing. Microsoft see’s this trend today on many social networks, such as Twitter, where shared links spread virally and amplify popular content. So.cl experiments with this concept by letting you easily share links as you search.

Students spend time sharing videos. So.cl extends this concept by making it easy to share video parties, with So.cl friends who are online. Video parties let you search, and quickly assemble a list of movies to view together with friends. You can view any existing party collection created by any other So.cl user, or create your own, and easily chat with other So.cl users.