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

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!

[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!

[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 ...

[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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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.”