Microsoft Fuse Labs has taken a leaf out of the content curation craze that is powering growth in platforms like Pinterest that is focused around allowing users to share their search results with its new So.cl platform.
So.cl has apparently been targeted at University and School students within the US, but not matching any of those requirements I had to only wait 24 hours to get my account approved.
The concept of So.cl is fairly simple and follows Facebook’s; everything should be open and shared mentality. You can quickly discover a number of people interested in similar topics and begin to interact and curate your search results.
Is It Another Social Stepchild?
The So.cl platform does seem fairly close to a love child of Google+ and Pinterest but is a fairly fun platform to use and does allow for easy creation of collages on topics that interest them directly from the Bing search results.
You have to remember that this is an experimental platform and is designed to overlay other social networks and not create a Facebook killer. It’s also much lighter hearted and fun than Google+ from day one, it’s not an unwanted stepchild but certainly an interesting experimental platform.
So What To Watch For With So.cl?
While they have been careful not to share everything directly to your Facebook/Live account, everything you search for is public by default.
It’s fairly simple and obvious to swap between “private” and “public” from the search window but the public search does take a bit of getting used to when people comment or share your search results.
So don’t search for anything you wouldn’t be willing to post publically on Facebook/Twitter otherwise you might get some unwanted attention from similar users on So.cl.
What’s Interesting About So.cl?
If you see something that is of interest and you want to go beyond sharing or just commenting on it you can “riff“ on it, which allows you to add to any existing post.
You can also have “video parties” that seem similar to a YouTube screenshare function but could be amazing if tied into Hulu or Netflix as it allows you to interact with other users via its chat function and discuss what you are watching.
My video review of So.cl
If you haven’t got access yet or don’t have a Facebook/Live Account you can watch my preview in the YouTube video below.
So I say have some fun with it, but I can already see how easily people could spam your feeds, the only thing that might limit this is the fact it’s tied to your Windows Live or Facebook account and it’s not anonymous as you can see here.
