So.cl (pronounced "social") was a

social networking service A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, act ...

and social search engine operated by

Microsoft FUSE Labs Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs was started by Ray Ozzie and is run bLili Cheng The group focuses on real-time and media rich experiences and is located in Bellevue, WA. It used to have offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Camb ...

. They announced on March 7, 2017 that it would be closing down So.cl on March 15, 2017.

Design

So.cl appeared similar to

Google+ Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

and borrows concepts from

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

and

Pinterest Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...

. It occupied a niche role and was intended to augment rather than replace those services. Users were able to post a collage of pictures pertaining to a specific topic and share it with friends or "followers". Users were also able to post visual comments under these posts by sending "riffs". Riffs were a separate collage of graphic media that relate to the topic of the post. By using riffs, users were able to communicate with other users with media that was related to their interests. Signup and

login In computer security, logging in (or logging on, signing in, or signing on) is the process by which an individual gains access to a computer system by identifying and authenticating themselves. The user credentials are typically some form ...

required a Microsoft account or So.cl-connected Facebook account. Registration was only open to users 18 and older. The site had integrated search features using the

Bing API Microsoft Bing (commonly known as Bing) is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety ...

. Searches were public by default, but could be marked private. Users could

follow Follow may refer to: * ''Follow'' (album), the third album by Pakho Chau *Follow (dancer), one member of a partner dance *"Follow", a song by Jerry Merrick, popularized by Richie Havens on his 1966 album ''Mixed Bag'' *"Follow", a song by Drowning ...

other users or categorical interest pages. Users could share content they viewed on the Internet with other users by installing the So.cl's Bookmarklet application which added a “Share on So.cl” button to the browser's bookmark bar. ;Video Parties Video Parties were collections of live

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

video shared and edited by users. ;Following interests Users could subscribe to Topic pages in order to populate their interest feeds.

History

So.cl launched in December 2011 and was first available through a partnership to students of the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

Syracuse University Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...

, and

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

. While still experimental, the site opened up to all users on 20 May 2012. The

web address A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...

is a

domain hack A domain hack is a domain name that suggests a word, phrase, or name when concatenating two or more adjacent levels of that domain. For example, and , using the fictitious country-code domains ''.ds'' and ''.le'', suggest the words ''birds'' an ...

using the

.cl .cl is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Chile. It was created in 1987 and is administered by the University of Chile. Registration of second-level domains under this TLD is open to anyone, as established by the current reg ...

top level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...

Public beta

Socl was released as a public beta on 4 December 2012. The announcement was made by a post by Microsoft Research's FuSE Lab on their website. The release came with a completely redesigned interface.

References

{{Online social networking Internet properties established in 2011 Social search Microsoft Bing Microsoft Research Defunct social networking services