Microsoft today published and then removed a landing page for its new social service named “Tulalip”. The page was seen by Fusible after the site was investifating Microsoft’s purchase of Socl.com. Microsoft’s page described the service that it would let you find what you need and sharing would be easier than ever.
Microsoft now has a short apology claiming that Socl.com was an integral design project being worked on by their research team and was published by mistake. This little mistake tells us that Microsoft is all wanting to enter the social network market and does not want to be left behind. Microsoft already has invested in Facebook which allows its services to integrate with Facebook.
One possibility engendered by the mention of searching and sharing is an expansion of the existing Bing Facebook integration. Bing already includes personalization of search results to include items liked by friends and make it easier to find people on Facebook within Bing. socl.com may be taking this further, for example to allow easier sharing of search results, or deeper search integration into Facebook and Twitter’s data. The company has other research projects in the social networking space. The public Spindex prototype aggregates social feeds. Its unique twist is trend identification; not the generic system-wide trends found in Twitter, but rather detection of trends among your own feeds, to make it easier to see at a glance what your contacts are all yammering about.
For now, we all are screaming no more Facebook like sites. We have had enough of Social networking sites!