Aren’t there enough social media platforms?  Microsoft has launched their own social platform in the hope of gaining market share in this ever growing and influential sector.  Question is  – will it catch on?

So.cl is designed for users to share web content, which are from Bing web searches. It’s not a search engine and nor is it a social network but a place to share news and links with your friends.The key thing is that it promotes Bing results visually which is pretty cool in it’s self but from a users perspective getting use to searching and navigating in a different manner takes a while to get your head round.  It’s more of an image representation of search content which is categorised in general categories – such as cars, food, movies, travel etc.

 Logging in and Using So.cl

You can login using your Facebook authentication or your Windows Live ID. Once in you can invite your friends to join the platform.

Explore

This is the main dashboard page for the platform which lists the main categories for  the content. The navigation to the other pages is on the left hand side.

Feed

Once you’ve identified a few categories you’re interested in you can go to the feed page which is like the Home feed on Twitter or Google+, You can message other So.cl users using the messaging section.

 Post

Once you’ve got your results from Bing you can drill down into the results. To add a post, you just click the “Add post button”

Video Parties

This is where you can watch YouTube videos with other users.  All parties are around a topic.

So will it catch on?

There seems to be a plethora of social media sites vying for attention and usage. People migrate to social media platforms where their peer group hang out and there’s a benefit in using the platform.

So.cl is still under the ‘experimental and research’ phase at Microsoft so this might not be the final iteration of the platform but a work in progress. Kind of gimmicky if you ask me………