“We expect students to continue using products such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other existing social networks, as well as Bing, Google and other search tools,” an English daily quoted Microsoft as saying.
It's a mix between Google+ and Storify. Users are encouraged to search for information about a particular topic, then compile the best results - textual content, images and videos - into a single post. So.cl, which launched in beta at the end of last year.
You can sign in using either Windows Live or Facebook,at http://www.so.cl/ and it is automatically connected to those accounts. That is an interesting move, and one that indicates that So.cl is not actually aiming to eliminate Facebook, but to compliment it in some way.
The site suggests that you subscribe to things you like so that when others search for, share, and/or post those things, the results will be in your feed. I don't think this is executed perfectly but out of all of the Big Ideas within so.cl, it seems like by far the best one.
Navigating the site is pretty far from intuitive -- for example, when trying to find interesting people I could follow (since no one I actually know is there yet), it automatically suggests ten popular people with no option to either see more, or check out their profiles without following them. There's also no way to import a profile photo -- you have to either have a Microsoft Live photo, or give it an existing URL.
The site is set up primarily to connect searching directly to social sharing.
Another big feature of so.cl is "video parties," which are "rooms" where you and other users are logged in and anyone can add youtube videos to a queue.