Getting hands on with Microsoft's new So.cl network

Niall Firth, technology editor

Whatever you do, just don't call it a new social network.

Microsoft opened up So.cl (pronounced "social") to the general public over the weekend. Dubbed "an experiment in open search", the lack of fanfare over its launch seemed designed to dampen expectations - the opposite of the carnival that accompanied the launch of Google+ last year. Initially only open to students at invited universities, So.cl is now open to everyone. So we've decided to give it a test drive.

They might not be calling it a social network but, in reality, So.cl appears to work as a mash-up between Facebook, web search and Pinterest. You sign in via Windows Live ID or Facebook and any friends of yours that are online are displayed - none in my case, but it's still early days. The results that appear when you search for a word, whether they are pictures, weblinks or documents, can then be added to a post and displayed in your feed. So.cl's search function is carried out by Microsoft's own Bing, of course.

Despite protestations to the contrary, So.cl feels very much like Microsoft's punt at a social network. Hitting "riff" lets you carry out the same search as someone else, limiting it to images or video, for example, and you can comment on posts and indicate your approval with a little smiley face - So.cl's version of the "Like". Parties let users share a chatroom to watch a video on a subject - popping in and out of rooms and commenting as it plays. My search for parties on "cheese" came to nothing, sadly.

Like Pinterest, you decide who you want to follow based upon subject matter: Siamese cats, burritos, F Scott Fitzgerald, whatever you're into. Once you've narrowed it down, each post on your timeline (the design of which looks rather similar to Google+) is the result of someone's search on those items.

Developed by the Microsoft Research's FUSE labs, the network is currently aimed at students and is supposed to aid in collaborative work on group projects. Web pages and images that your own search throws up can then be seen by people working on a similar project. That's the theory, in any case.

The idea is that anyone who searches for a particular term can then hand-pick the links/images that are most useful, decluttering the search for people who are interested in the same thing. Users can tag searches with keywords - but this seems pretty random at the moment. A search for "science" gave me a user named Adam's photo of a semi-naked woman on a tropical beach. Like other social networks, So.cl also relies on user opinion to decide what counts as an interesting post. The search for "funny" seemed to cover a rather broad spectrum of humour, to put it mildly.

At the moment, every search defaults to "public" and you can't upload your own photos (this is not a social network after all, remember!). And how it sits alongside Bing's recent personalised search results, which pull in data from Facebook, remains to be seen.

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