Tulalip project leaked to the network

Just yesterday, a funny story happened that is being retold by all the largest information portals. What you see above is all that remains of the main page of socl.com , where the inscription already flaunts: “Thank you for stopping. Socl.com is an internal design project from the Microsoft Research team that was mistakenly published online. We didn’t want to, really. ”

That's just the truth, it doesn’t look very much, especially considering the words that we see in the screenshot: “With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever.” The Fusible resource, the first to come across this site, discovered that Tulalip is the name of the first tribes to settle near Redmond, where Microsoft is currently headquartered.

Everyone immediately remembered Ballmer’s words that “no one needs another Facebook” because the project is designed in a social theme - this is evidenced not only by the design, but also the buttons for entering the site using Twitter and Facebook accounts. But the words written in capital letters in the greeting seem to hint that this is a certain add-on for Bing (which is socialized by leaps and bounds, already offering an individual output of results), which allows sharing the found content. At the same time, given the possibility of integrating with the accounts of the two most popular networks today, perhaps we are talking about aggregating social content into a third platform, in this case Tulalip itself. As you know, if you can’t win, join us.

The main page was cleaned very quickly, and Microsoft has stated several times that it was an “incident”. Although to me personally it seems more like a "breakdown of the pen", removed due to excessive attention.

It is worth noting that the company has other projects in the field of social networks (except, in fact, the networks themselves). For example, the Spindex prototype aggregates social news feeds, its peculiarity is to find popular topics - trends, making this it does not rely on popular topics in the entire system (like “top trends” on Twitter), but processing “friends” to make it easier Understand what information is popular among your contacts.

If Microsoft wanted to enter the social media market, the product would be very carefully positioned, as the giant from Redmond has sufficient experience in this area. Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail can provide a large number of subscribers from scratch, already interconnected.

But, as already mentioned, most likely this is another service from the series “we aggregate everything, share the chosen ones”. A lot of work has already been done to make Windows Live the ultimate stop for users of all social networks (except, perhaps, the same Twitter, from which everything cannot be sucked out due to the policy prescribed in the licensed conditions for using the service), in the absence of a social network from Microsoft itself.

Fusible via TechCrunch via ArsTechnica