Monday, July 18, 2011

Wait for me! says Microsoft

According to industry experts, Microsoft has "unintentionally" leaked information on their own social networking site in the works. A picture showing the homepage of Tulalip (also the name of a Native American tribe near Microsoft HQ), on the site socl.com, which is allegedly owned by Microsoft. The picture has since been pulled down and replaced with the statement, “Thanks for stopping by. Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn’t mean to, honest.”
Based on what we could see on the page, it seems like Tulalip will try to "socialize" the search process, and make it more interactive between communities. As the leaked page showed both FB and Twitter links, Tulalip will most likely leverage existing social networks rather than try to compete directly. Do we have room in our lives for yet another social networking function online? And will Microsoft, not known as an innovation powerhouse when compared to google and facebook, be able to successfully market to the social network users? And what's to stop google from easily incorporating a "social search" element into google+?

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