4 ms·
Microsoft opens its own social network
- mathattack 14y agoI was scratching my head on this. Where's the buzz? What's this have that Google+ missed on?
- stusmall 14y agoYeah, I'm kind of surprised too. I try to keep an eye out for these things and this is the first I've heard of it. It makes me wonder how serious they are about this.
- simba-hiiipower 14y agoit’s actually been around for a little while now. i remember first hearing of it about a year ago, and according to this [1] they launched a private beta back in december 2011 as for how serious they are, i’d say not really, at least in terms of building-out a viable network to compete with the likes of a facebook. i get the impression that it's more of a large-scale research effort with a focus on integrating social in a more meaningful way, particularly as it relates to search i think this [from the source below] sums it up pretty well: Microsoft officials have described Socl as a kind of mash-up of social-networking and search that is designed to get the learning communities to start thinking about how to use collaboration technologies in new ways. And according to the Softies and contrary to popular rumors, Socl is not an attempt to take on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler or Pinterest. Socl combined ideas the FUSE Labs teams have pioneered in some of their other experimental projects, like Montage (a photo collage app) and Kodu (game programming). Microsoft built Socl using TypeScript, its superset of JavaScript. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-opens-its-socl-social-search-site-to-any-and-all-testers-7000008291/ http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-opens-its-socl-social-search-...
- vitorarins 14y agoIt can show animated gifs??
- laserDinosaur 14y agoSockel? Strange name.
- navneetpandey 14y agoWhat a waste
- andreiursan 14y ago(One of) the first social network where you can sign in with Facebook.
- nwh 14y agoMySpace offers the same, believe it or not.
- fwr 14y agoThe other one is Facebook.
- andreiursan 14y agoVery disapointed that I cannot sign in with Google+
- Timmy_C 14y agoAfter Friendster did their big redesign they added Facebook login too. I think that was about a year ago now.
- paulsutter 14y agoWhy do one thing well, when you can do many things with tepid mediocrity? Look what's happening to Microsoft's core business: http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-2012-internet-trends-year-end-update-2012-12#-24 http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-2012-internet-tre... EDIT: You won me over cooldeal. (robotic voice) Clippy is better than Google Now. I will start using Bing.
- cooldeal 14y agoWhy take the time to write an insightful comment on the actual news at hand when you can score brownie points with yet another knee jerk 'MS is dying' comment linking to blog spam that further links to one graph that somehow proves your point? What about this news then? http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-8-overtakes-android-web-traffic-just-ten-days-according-statcounter http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-8-overtakes-android-web-... How does that fit in with the graph you posted? Statistics are like bikinis, they hide more than what they reveal. However, this being the top comment on this article says more than about HN than you.
- k3n 14y agoYou make an excellent point, because I don't trust those Win8 numbers at all.
- untog 14y agoSo when you see numbers you agree with, it's fine. But when you see numbers you don't agree with, you don't trust them? OK.
- k3n 14y agoCan you show me where I said that I ever trusted any of StatCounter's data?
- cooldeal 14y agoThis is the problem with the OP I was talking about. Comments without any reasoning or insight, just "this is it". And this is why length of the comment is usually negatively correlated with comment quality. You failed to tell why you didn't trust the numbers in your original comment. Was it because of Statcounter? Do you suspect they were cooked up by Microsoft? Or did you feel that it didn't jive with your real world anecdote? Or did you think Windows 8 is such a failure that such numbers are impossible? "I don't trust those numbers" can mean any or all of the above including more, the replies have to guess what you meant.
- jborden13 14y agoAnother "me-too" product from a once innovative tech titan (yes they still do innovate - just not on this).
- fwr 14y ago> Welcome, you can create your own collage in seconds What kind of headline is that?
- eddmc 14y agoMicrosoft had a social network. It was called MSN Messenger. Of course, they killed it This effort looks like another Zune
- sk55 14y agoHN conversation when they released the beta: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3999671 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3999671
- theklub 14y agoDon't they already have a social network with Xbox Live, ETC... seems like building off of that more would be the right move.
- iso-8859-1 14y agoThe Live brand was retired: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live They won't make launch anything that used to have that brand, people wouldn't use a product that was already discontinued.
- Mutinix 14y agoI'm genuinely curious to know when and where the trend of naming companies or products by removing the vowels or random letters from a word started from. I've seen it in a number of places. Why? Is it because if they use the full word, it becomes too general and difficult to associate?
- mcdoh 14y agoOr the domain name they were interested in is being squatted upon.
- mbrubeck 14y agoI believe the success of flickr.com (registered in 2003, launched in 2004) kicked off the current vogue for these names, though there are earlier examples too: http://www.branddialogue.com/diablogue/2006/06/names-that-hurt/ http://www.branddialogue.com/diablogue/2006/06/names-that-hu... Misspelled words -- especially shortened ones -- have certain persistent advantages as names for web companies. It's easier to find available domains; it's a unique word for search engines; it's short and therefore quick to type. Of course there are disadvantages too... Twitter was originally called "Twttr" when it launched in 2006, but later restored the vowels: http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/ http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/
- kaolinite 14y agoI don't understand why they picked a really short domain "so.cl" and then redirect users to "www.so.cl" as soon as you hit it (which IMO looks kinda weird).
- simonw 14y agoso.cl is a short enough domain that some browsers might forbid it from setting cookies, since it's the same length as .co.uk (and letting sites set cookies for the whole .co.uk space would be a massive privacy violation).
- WizKid 14y agoI thought browsers used http://publicsuffix.org/ http://publicsuffix.org/ and not length of domain names to do that.
- simonw 14y agoEach browser has their own way of handling this - public suffix is Mozilla's solution but I don't know if any if the other browsers are using it directly (I'd be surprised if IE didn't have their own approach).
- nwh 14y agoWhile I see the point (and some TLD do have A records), I've never had issues setting cookies from two letter second level domains. At least with modem browsers that doesn't seem to be an issue.
- freehunter 14y agoI didn't dig around much to see if it has anything in the way of content filtering, but I loaded it up at work and was greeted with a page filled with scantily-clad ladies in suggestive poses. I work information security so I spend a decent amount of time evaluating risks associated with allowing certain sites at work and visiting random websites is not frowned upon for this reason, but as soon as I see suggestive materials I'm out of there. Hey Microsoft, how about some content filtering turned on by default to hide potentially objectionable or NSFW materials? Also while I have your attention, why roll this out without any WP8 integration?
- babblingdweeb 14y agoDitto for me. "Above the fold" photos of severely/epic photoshopped boobs, etc. Scrolling a little further down I was greeted with photos of poop. Lots of them. I'll skip what there were photos of on the next page. Suffice to say, I am sure there are a ton of Internet trolls taking advantage of the lack of filtering, and they want to make the site look bad. Hopefully MS can put some type of fix on that sooner than later. Otherwise, I assume some early adopters might be turned off just from going to the home page.
- jwarzech 14y agoThey definitely need a better way to determine what content gets featured on the front page of their site.....the first image was a nsfw collection...
- xionon 14y agoPotential NSFW warning: When I visited http://beta.so.cl/ http://beta.so.cl/, I got a big eyeful of the image from the old goatse.cx (in case anyone doesn't know what that is, here's a sfw explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx)
- lmkg 14y agoThis is a research project out of MSR, not a product out of Microsoft proper. I'm still not exactly sure what it is that they're researching ("social search"? ¯\(°_o)/¯), but it does make a lot more sense as an off-the-wall experiment than a finished corporate product. http://www.so.cl/about http://www.so.cl/about > Socl is a research project from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs...
- adamnemecek 14y agoLook into research of danah boyd who does this sort of research at MSR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danah_boyd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danah_boyd) Here are the names of her last 4 papers: - "Networked Trafficking: Reflections on Technology and the Anti-Trafficking Movement." - "Making Sense of Teen Life: Strategies for Capturing Ethnographic Data in a Networked Era." - "The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare." - "Sociality through Social Network Sites."
- k3n 14y agoOh look, a G+ clone... MS is so inept at anything "social", it's sad they even keep trying (but I guess if you have enough monkeys banging away on a keyboard long enough, they'll eventually pound out the next FB "killer"). The Messenger+Live (aka. "Messenger social" from the site itself) is a comedy of errors -- has anyone signed into that recently? It's XP meets Vista meets Win8, but mostly just the annoying parts of each. And their "social forums"[1] are the worst forums that I've ever had the privilege of ignoring. 1. http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/ http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/
- Timmy_C 14y agoEveryone agrees that we're going to call this "sock-el" right?
- mrcharles 14y agoI can only view it as So-Chlorine.
- mrcharles 14y agoFront page already has pages dedicated to porn stars and is borderline NSFW, if you were looking to check it out.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- schrodinger 14y agoLotsa NSFW posts showing up when I tried it, careful...
- vonuebelgarten 14y agoSo, is it an Apple Ping 2.0? Destined to the same fate, I suppose.