Since I found out about MSFT So.cl last week, I've been on So.cl starting Wednesday. It had two options for login, either connecting with Facebook or Hotmail account. I used my Hotmail account to log in and took a tour.
In a nutshell, So.cl is Bing search meeting social. It is primarily search experience sharing tool, and it's fairly good at that. As soon as you start searching for something on top search text area, your search keywords and the result you clicked on will be automatically posted publicly for everyone else to see.
I could not find an option to change this automatic sharing behavior. Fuse Labs team must have felt that this is a crucial piece to the user experience that they are aiming at, but this limitation pretty much eliminates So.cl being the one and only way to search on any user's desktop (or unless you are careless college students who think sharing everything is cool).
So.cl does utilize this automatic sharing very well, however. It is deceptively easy to put together collage of search results to create a quick online scrapbook. All you need is to get an idea of what you want to search, and select from bunch of search results served by Bing.
Take a look at what I put together about my Future of Social Network blog.
It literally took me 30 seconds or so to put this post together about my blog site;
Steven Ickman at Fuse Labs would be pleased to know.
In a nutshell, So.cl is Bing search meeting social. It is primarily search experience sharing tool, and it's fairly good at that. As soon as you start searching for something on top search text area, your search keywords and the result you clicked on will be automatically posted publicly for everyone else to see.
I could not find an option to change this automatic sharing behavior. Fuse Labs team must have felt that this is a crucial piece to the user experience that they are aiming at, but this limitation pretty much eliminates So.cl being the one and only way to search on any user's desktop (or unless you are careless college students who think sharing everything is cool).
So.cl does utilize this automatic sharing very well, however. It is deceptively easy to put together collage of search results to create a quick online scrapbook. All you need is to get an idea of what you want to search, and select from bunch of search results served by Bing.
Take a look at what I put together about my Future of Social Network blog.
It literally took me 30 seconds or so to put this post together about my blog site;
Steven Ickman at Fuse Labs would be pleased to know.
What is cool about So.cl's idea is that everyone is able to see the stream of real-time search terms scrolling by from fellow users, and you can click to see the same results right from your feed. Power of feed comes from showing individual user account who ran the search, and giving anyone a chance to look at what they have been searching. It has Pinterest-like quality to it. So.cl even allows other users to respond to your search result by 'riffing' (reply with searched image).
Overall I liked what Fuse Labs team put together. I also liked their approach of going straight to college students to get their feedback first as their bootstrapping strategy. A big question is whether Fuse Labs will be able to iterate as fast as other social startups. Let's keep an eye on them.
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