Microsoft Tests Social Search Waters With 'so.cl' Network

benfrog writes "Microsoft just quietly launched so.cl in an experiment to more closely unite web searches and social networking. It's not intended as a stand-alone social network — users can log in with Facebook or Windows Live IDs, and it will share your searches publicly by default. "As students work together, they often search for the same items, and discover new shared interests by sharing links. We see this trend today on many social networks, such as Twitter, where shared links spread virally and amplify popular content. So.cl experiments with this concept by automatically sharing links as you search." They've also (wisely?) put Bing Search at the center of the site."

Comments

Share links? wtf?

[Nyder]

Seriously, I don't care what my friends are searching, and honestly, knowing some of the shit i search for, I don't want to know what my friends are searching for.

Social Networking is cool, i guess, but seriously, do we fucking need to share everything we do online?

If I find something cool, I can easily tell my friends. I can email them, twitter them, facebook wall it, text them, and probably some other ways also. In fact, it gives me a chance to actually communicate with them, instead them getting some automated message about what I'm doing.

I'm sure all this social stuff is really cool, but really, aren't we going a bit overboard on it? Is this the way to communicate by not actually communicating?

For example:

Joe: "Hey, how is your brother doing, Dave?"
Dave: "According to so.cl, he's got crabs, is looking for a new job, and seems to be interested in Chicks with Dicks."
Joe: "So you haven't actually talked to him lately?"
Dave: "Talk about what? Everything we do is recorded and sent to all my friends, nothing to talk about."