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

Re:Another failed social project from Microsoft

[Fwipp]

When the headline is a question, the answer is usually "no."

Facebook is still tops

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Yeah, FB jumped the shark a long time ago, and look for it to become even more careless about user privacy now that it's publicly traded. No other network, not even Google+, has been able to knock it down yet though. Myspace died because Facebook was 'cooler'. You can't put that in a bottle. Or, if you think you know how, billions of dollars await you.

Re:Facebook is still tops

[ILongForDarkness]

My, albeit limited, experience with MySpace is that it is a completely different animal. It is designed as a simple personal website with extras to allow you to interact with your "fans". FB from the ground up was designed to find other people and interact with them. The wall/profile is more of a way of knowing you got the right Melissa Etheridge before you start throwing your tomatoes.

Broken english error message

[Dwedit]

"Open require Javascript, please enable the javascript in your browser and try again"

Sounds like an outsourced job.

Re:Broken english error message

[maztuhblastah]

Sounds like an outsourced job.

Have you ever been so far as to wanting the Microsoft needful search? With JavaScript, you will experience the very social!

As modern Internet Explorer browser and functionality such as JavaScript support, download and try requested site again. ...

Yeah. About that... I'll leave NoScript on, thanks. :D

I see Frank is searching for nude girls with meat

[cpu6502]

No.
There are some things about my friends I'd rather not know.

Paradox!

[naroom]

If this sentence was a headline, would the answer be "no"?

Re:Paradox!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

To be henceforth called naroom's paradox! :D

Re:Paradox!

[dyingtolive]

You must be fun at parties.

Re:Paradox!

[FrootLoops]

That's very stupid. Hypothetical questions can have value, and if you insist on answering them all with "no" you lose that value. Here's an example taken from Albert Einstein; I've modified it somewhat, but the ideas are the same:

If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), do I observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating? Yes, according to the Gallilean transformation, I would. However, there seems to be no such thing, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell's equations, so I deduced the principle of relativity.

(Original here)

If you insisted on answering "no" to his question, you'd get the wrong conclusion. Just because you can't get to velocity c doesn't mean the thought experiment is "outside the framework of Truth" (whatever the hell that means). This would all be fine if you simply accepted that an argument can have a truth value independent of its premises and conclusions. The argument "If all cats are dogs and all dogs are horses, all cats are horses" is true. However, the premises are false, so the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the truth of the argument, and in fact in this case the conclusion is false. I could write this more clearly in first order predicate logic if needed.

To be honest, you don't really know what you're talking about, your professors were probably annoyed by your smugness mixed with your stupidity--not the fact that you were right--and you should have been modded down, not up.

Re:Paradox!

[DragonWriter]

One cannot answer hypothetical questions correctly

Sure you can.

since they offer no "truth" (the "yes") from which to derive an answer.

Assuming by "truth" you mean something like "accurate statements of external reality", this is not required for a correct response to a hypothetical question.

The logic (Philosophy) professors at college hated me, because I was right. ALL hypothetical questions must be answered hypothetically.

Uh, yeah. I doubt they hated you for that, since everyone knows that. They might have disliked your failure to understand what answering hypothetically means, though.

The question in class were usually something like "If all cats are dogs and all dogs are horses, are all cats horses?", the hypothetical answer is "yes" but in reality (truth) is no.

No, the answer, period, is yes, whether this is intended as a definition blind hypothetical (so that "cat", "dog", and "horse" are just variable names, not terms with definitions outside the question) or whether its a hypothetical about "cats", "dogs", and "horses" under the usual definitions.

In the former case, the question is equivalent to:
Given p -> q and q -> r, does p -> r? Implication is transitive, the answer is yes.

In the latter case, then the question is "Is the implication ((p -> q) && (q -> r)) -> (p->r) satisfied when p->q, q->r, and p->r are always false." The answer here is also yes.

This is important because people often base hypothetical questions as "fact"

This clause is incoherent. If you mean people often assume that the premise of a hypothetical question is fact, then, to the extent that that is true, its simply a failure to understand what a hypothetical question is. It has no impact on the correct manner of answering such a question.

Re:Paradox!

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The logic (Philosophy) professors at college hated me, because I was right.

They didn't hate you. You weren't interesting enough to be worthy of hatred. They may, however, have been deeply annoyed by you, because you were always taking up class time with your incoherent babbling which you thought was a brilliant refutation of their ideas and everyone else could tell immediately was complete crap.

In general, any tale along the lines of "The Xs hated me because I outsmarted them," where the Xs are any group of authority figures, took place only in the teller's imagination.

Re:Paradox!

[LordLimecat]

You seem to miss what is being asked in these hypotheticals. When the word "if" is used, you are expected to give an answer as if that premise were true. You CAN answer those questions "correctly". For example, heres a hypothetical for you:

If I were to ask you what 2+2 is, and you were to answer 5, would you be wrong?

If you answer no, you will be wrong. There is no situation in which the the answer would be "no", unless there were additional premises not specified (in which case you have changed the hypothetical).

This is important because people often base hypothetical questions as "fact", and thus trap people into thinking the logic of the question is "true" and thus the whole premise is "true" when in fact, it was just a hypothetical question, with a false premise, of which the answer ... by default ... should have been in the negative.

I offer an alternative: That you are NOT smarter than every other person who has ever considered hypotheticals, and have merely misunderstood what is being driven at. Its also possible that the reason you drove your professors up the wall is NOT because you were smarter than them.

I leave it to you to ponder that, however.

Re:Paradox!

[ignavus]

The logic (Philosophy) professors at college hated me, because I was right. ALL hypothetical questions must be answered hypothetically. The question in class were usually something like "If all cats are dogs and all dogs are horses, are all cats horses?", the hypothetical answer is "yes" but in reality (truth) is no.

You have just reinvented the subjunctive mood for verbs. Just rewrite your syllogism in the old fashioned English subjunctive mood and see:

"If all cats WERE dogs, and all dogs WERE horses, WOULD all cats BE horses?" Yes, they would be, but they aren't, as you pointed out. A counter-factual "would be" can coexist with a factual "are not". Making hypothetical, but false, statements is one of the classic uses of the subjunctive. The subjunctive makes it clear that you are not asserting a real fact, just a hypothesis.

Re:Probably violates Facebook's TOS ...

[snl2587]

It's Facebook Connect, which is a pretty standard login method now...

Re:Another failed social project from Microsoft

[recoiledsnake]

Photosynth lives on as a popular iOS app and on the web.

This is a research project, nothing like Google Wave or even Ping. Not everything that is researched needs to be a successful product.

Also, note to posters who keep calling bonch a MS shill, he's nothing like one. He's actually a anti-MS, anti-Google, pro-Apple shill.

Re:Probably violates Facebook's TOS ...

[Baloroth]

Not your login information, no. You login through Facebook itself (HTTPS) and it uses some sort of identifier system to verify the login to MS. However, it also lets MS access your name and profile information, especially email address (including friends, although those are supposedly not retained). So no, you don't give MS your login information. You do, however, grant them the right to retain all your searches and use all your public information for any purposes whatsoever, so there is that.

If anyone

[Sparticus789]

Dear Mr. Microsoft.

Since you already have penetrated my life so fully, I also want you to have access to a list of my friends and their information too. I know you will never use this information in a bad way, or to profit off of me.

Sincerely, The Ignorant Masses

Site attempts to breach browser security

[Animats]

Timestamp: 5/22/2012 12:06:38 PM Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Security error" code: "1000" nsresult: "0x805303e8 (NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR)" location: "http://www.so.cl/ Line: 185"]

That site has such intrusive code that Firefox 12 with high security settings won't even display it.

Re:Another failed social project from Microsoft

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I know its MS, but is there really any such thing as bad research? Barring obviously nazi experimentation and whatnot. Maybe it will fail, maybe it will bring something new to the table, maybe it will inspire someone to do something completely different, even if it does fail.

And probably your friend's data too...

[thrill12]

...which is the biggest problem with many of these schemes: friends giving away other friends' data. Is that term still correct in that case ?

pr0n, not academic use

[vlm]

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.

Yes, the above is true and I'm sure the reader is suppose to think kids are researching academic topics like Dr Martin Luther King Jr's speeches and the metabolic pathways of the TCA cycle, but lets be realistic, its going to be used to search for pr0n. And there's nothing really wrong with that, either.

Re:Another failed social project from Microsoft

[ILongForDarkness]

It is the privacy side of things that are worrisome I think. Social search sounds great until you forget it is broadcasting and search for something embarrassing.

Re:Another failed social project from Microsoft

[ILongForDarkness]

Oh for example in Canada a murder trial just finished and one of the pieces of evidence (that were thrown out on technical grounds) was that the suspect has searched for kiddy rape/porn. Guy admits to being guilty I think (argument was just whether or not he or his girlfriend was the one that came up with the idea and used the hammer), but still say he was innocent but a pervert. Sure get him on the kiddy porn but I'm sure he'd wish they couldn't even find it in the first place since it makes him look like a likely candidate for the murder as well. Social search just adds another layer of potential screw ups leaving incriminating evidence around.

Re:Another failed social project from Microsoft

[Sarten-X]

Google has nothing of the sort, except its API, which allows only 100 queries per day per account, unless you pay at a rate of $5 per 1000 queries. That's well within most research budgets, and certainly within the needs of most individuals.

Re:Probably violates Facebook's TOS ...

[Big Sausage Festival]

And you continue jabbering about things you don't know anything about.

It's not automatic. Facebook Connect will popup in a new window, it will tell you what information the site will get and then you have a button where you can login using Facebook.

Google has similar stuff, but for Google accounts.

And in other news...

[JohnnyMindcrime]

...tickets for the "How many days does Ballmer have left" sweepstake went on sale today.

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."

RE: "so.cl"

[denis-The-menace]

anybody else first pronounced it in their head as "Suckle"?

Oh boy.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Another contender for the world's most empty social network.

Re:Another failed social project from Microsoft

[Sarten-X]

Completely free, up to 5000 per month, which is still far under anything like DuckDuckGo's needs. For comparison, Google's 100-per-day is 3000 free queries per month. Microsoft's free offering is slightly less ridiculously limited than Google, but neither is usable for a successful site. If your site is popular, you're going to have to pay somebody.

Why?

[wcrowe]

I have two questions:

1. Why would I want to share my search results with everyone?

and more importantly,

2. Why would I want everyone to share their search results with me?

Another failed group of Slashdot comments

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Insert generic "Microsoft sucks" comment.

Seriously guys?

Regardless of whether so.cl succeeds or fails, by having another "giant" enter the social networking arena will drive up innovation.

When Google released Google+, yes we can agree that its kind of stillborn and lacking, but if forced Facebook to innovate and provide additional features. Google+ then also followed suit by making its features better.

I have no doubt that Microsoft is capable of doing a few things better then the rest, so if those things are disruptive to the way the current "standards" deliver social networking, then it will be a win for everyone when social networking improves as a whole.

Lets put it this way, Google, Apple and Facebook are ALL paying close attention. Its the reason why the are billion dollar companies and you drive a used Corolla, they don't just say "Microsoft sucks" and move on, they made something better.

Sure its easy and safe to say that Microsoft does not have a chance to displace Facebook, or even Google+, but this is only a research project and I think a few ideas will most likely trickle their way into Facebook and Google+ and social networking in general. Its interesting to see their take on social networking and foolish to assume they are completely irrelevant.

Re:Another failed group of Slashdot comments

[Nyder]

Insert generic "Microsoft sucks" comment.

Seriously guys?

Regardless of whether so.cl succeeds or fails, by having another "giant" enter the social networking arena will drive up innovation.

...

Really? Seems to me it's just another example of MS trying to get on a bandwagon once again, since they are always late to the party. And having searches shared with friends isn't innovation, it's fucking creepy.

Re:Another failed social project from Microsoft

[Dishevel]

Ridiculously limited?
So how much free shit should you be given before it moves up to just limited.

Seems to me that they are both attempting to offer people who want to try out cool little things all the access they would ever need for free.

But if you want them to spend money on power and cooling for 1000 requests per day so that you can make money on their dime they charge for that.

I think that this is a completely fair stance for both companies to take.

Bing Minus “cut off Facebook’s air sup

[David Gerard]

YESLER WAY, Seattle,, Saturday (MSBBC) — Microsoft today stealth-released its new social network, Bing Minus, automatically adding every person in the world still using Internet Explorer, such as your mother.

The Bing Minus software was distributed Friday morning in an automatic urgent mandatory critical Windows security update. It will also be available on Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry.

“Social networking is the new primary focus Microsoft is betting the business on,” said CEO Steve Ballmer, defining “the business” as “my job.” “It’s already banned in China!” he proudly declared, although Chinese contacts deny this. Productivity has also increased in offices containing Bing Minus users.

Bloggers and tweeters are already swapping tips on how not to obtain Bing Minus invitations every time you click on anything whatsoever in IE or Windows itself.

“Facebook is definitely quaking in its boots. Who are users going to want to give all their information to, Facebook or Microsoft? I think the choice is obvious.”

Ballmer looks forward to a bright future for Bing Minus. “Whatever happens,” he said, “it’s going to suck less than Buzz.”