Microsoft opens its own social network | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft opens its own social network

cnn.com

26 pointsbretthellman49 comments

This is a research project out of MSR, not a product out of Microsoft proper. I'm still not exactly sure what it is that they're researching ("social search"? ¯\(°_o)/¯), but it does make a lot more sense as an off-the-wall experiment than a finished corporate product.

http://www.so.cl/about

> Socl is a research project from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs...

Look into research of danah boyd who does this sort of research at MSR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danah_boyd)

Here are the names of her last 4 papers:

- "Networked Trafficking: Reflections on Technology and the Anti-Trafficking Movement."

- "Making Sense of Teen Life: Strategies for Capturing Ethnographic Data in a Networked Era."

- "The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare."

- "Sociality through Social Network Sites."

Why do one thing well, when you can do many things with tepid mediocrity?

Look what's happening to Microsoft's core business:

http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-2012-internet-tre...

EDIT: You won me over cooldeal. (robotic voice) Clippy is better than Google Now. I will start using Bing.

Why take the time to write an insightful comment on the actual news at hand when you can score brownie points with yet another knee jerk 'MS is dying' comment linking to blog spam that further links to one graph that somehow proves your point?

What about this news then? http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-8-overtakes-android-web-...

How does that fit in with the graph you posted?

Statistics are like bikinis, they hide more than what they reveal.

However, this being the top comment on this article says more than about HN than you.

The winbeta article you've linked to is a repost of this article: http://microsoft-news.com/windows-8-overtake-android-web-pre...

This completely ignores mobile android use! It's basically comparing desktop Android (Tablets) with Windows 8.

StatCounter doesn't publish web traffic os data across mobile and desktop, but if you look at overall mobile vs. desktop, it's 86.7% vs. 13.3% [1]

If you look at the data for the start of the graph:

Android has 31% of mobile [2] (0.133 * .31 = 0.041, or 4% of the overall mobile+desktop)

Android also has 0.64% of desktop [3] (0.867 * 0.0064 = 0.0055, or 0.5% of the overall)

So Android has 4.5% of Mobile + Desktop

While Win8 has 0.35% of desktop [3] (0.867 * 0.0035 = 0.003, or 0.35% overall)

so it's 4.5% for Android vs. 0.35% for Win8

For the end of the period in the graph, Win8 has risen to 0.71% or 0.61% overall (Android will have stayed the same at 4.5%).

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-daily-201210...

[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-daily-20121021-20121...

[3] http://gs.statcounter.com/chart.php?bar=1&statType_hidde...

You make an excellent point, because I don't trust those Win8 numbers at all.

So when you see numbers you agree with, it's fine. But when you see numbers you don't agree with, you don't trust them? OK.

Can you show me where I said that I ever trusted any of StatCounter's data?

This is the problem with the OP I was talking about. Comments without any reasoning or insight, just "this is it". And this is why length of the comment is usually negatively correlated with comment quality.

You failed to tell why you didn't trust the numbers in your original comment. Was it because of Statcounter? Do you suspect they were cooked up by Microsoft? Or did you feel that it didn't jive with your real world anecdote? Or did you think Windows 8 is such a failure that such numbers are impossible?

"I don't trust those numbers" can mean any or all of the above including more, the replies have to guess what you meant.

> "I don't trust those numbers" can mean any or all of the above including more, the replies have to guess what you meant.

No, you [they] do not have to guess; one could inquire for clarification, or simply ignore the comment.

To make a gross logical fallacy -- such as Untog did -- is not my fault nor is it my problem. Untog drew a conclusion where data was nonexistant, and then extrapolated his conclusion to draw an even more unsubstantiated conclusion.

What is so hard about not putting words in someone's mouth?

You make a good point but you're just wrong.

Wasn't it Statcounter that first said Chrome overtook IE in web usage and then Microsoft tried to muddy that by pointing to some other statistics site? It's hard to believe they're making things up to favor MS after that blog battle.

What about Steams' statistics? http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-8-thunders-past-ma...

Would you trust that or is Gabe who famously said Windows 8 is going to be catastrophe is now faking stats?

I don't think the Steam figures are indicative of anything other than the fact that gamers prefer Windows because it's still the only viable platform for mainstream PC gaming.

And was Gabe explicitly commenting on adoption rate of Win8? Or perhaps was he referring to the fact that developing games for Win8 will likely lead to fewer and lower-quality games on that platform?

Gamers are notorious early adopters. Only 5% adoption of Windows 8 by Steam users sounds extremely low to me.

And your link says OS X share may be only of the Steam market is 3.3%, and OS X share of the total desktop market is between 6% and 10% depending on who you ask. Using some terribly sloppy, but not entirely unreasonable math, OSX-Steam has captured 30-50% of the available market in two years. That sounds wildly successful.

Don't they already have a social network with Xbox Live, ETC... seems like building off of that more would be the right move.

The Live brand was retired: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live

They won't make launch anything that used to have that brand, people wouldn't use a product that was already discontinued.

HN conversation when they released the beta: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3999671

Another "me-too" product from a once innovative tech titan (yes they still do innovate - just not on this).

I'm genuinely curious to know when and where the trend of naming companies or products by removing the vowels or random letters from a word started from. I've seen it in a number of places. Why? Is it because if they use the full word, it becomes too general and difficult to associate?

I believe the success of flickr.com (registered in 2003, launched in 2004) kicked off the current vogue for these names, though there are earlier examples too:

http://www.branddialogue.com/diablogue/2006/06/names-that-hu...

Misspelled words -- especially shortened ones -- have certain persistent advantages as names for web companies. It's easier to find available domains; it's a unique word for search engines; it's short and therefore quick to type.

Of course there are disadvantages too... Twitter was originally called "Twttr" when it launched in 2006, but later restored the vowels:

http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/

Or the domain name they were interested in is being squatted upon.

I didn't dig around much to see if it has anything in the way of content filtering, but I loaded it up at work and was greeted with a page filled with scantily-clad ladies in suggestive poses. I work information security so I spend a decent amount of time evaluating risks associated with allowing certain sites at work and visiting random websites is not frowned upon for this reason, but as soon as I see suggestive materials I'm out of there.

Hey Microsoft, how about some content filtering turned on by default to hide potentially objectionable or NSFW materials? Also while I have your attention, why roll this out without any WP8 integration?

Ditto for me.

"Above the fold" photos of severely/epic photoshopped boobs, etc. Scrolling a little further down I was greeted with photos of poop. Lots of them. I'll skip what there were photos of on the next page.

Suffice to say, I am sure there are a ton of Internet trolls taking advantage of the lack of filtering, and they want to make the site look bad. Hopefully MS can put some type of fix on that sooner than later. Otherwise, I assume some early adopters might be turned off just from going to the home page.

They definitely need a better way to determine what content gets featured on the front page of their site.....the first image was a nsfw collection...

Potential NSFW warning: When I visited http://beta.so.cl/, I got a big eyeful of the image from the old goatse.cx

(in case anyone doesn't know what that is, here's a sfw explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx)

Microsoft had a social network. It was called MSN Messenger.

Of course, they killed it

This effort looks like another Zune

> Welcome, you can create your own collage in seconds

What kind of headline is that?

(One of) the first social network where you can sign in with Facebook.

The other one is Facebook.

MySpace offers the same, believe it or not.

After Friendster did their big redesign they added Facebook login too. I think that was about a year ago now.

Very disapointed that I cannot sign in with Google+

I don't understand why they picked a really short domain "so.cl" and then redirect users to "www.so.cl" as soon as you hit it (which IMO looks kinda weird).

so.cl is a short enough domain that some browsers might forbid it from setting cookies, since it's the same length as .co.uk (and letting sites set cookies for the whole .co.uk space would be a massive privacy violation).

I thought browsers used http://publicsuffix.org/ and not length of domain names to do that.

Each browser has their own way of handling this - public suffix is Mozilla's solution but I don't know if any if the other browsers are using it directly (I'd be surprised if IE didn't have their own approach).

While I see the point (and some TLD do have A records), I've never had issues setting cookies from two letter second level domains. At least with modem browsers that doesn't seem to be an issue.

Front page already has pages dedicated to porn stars and is borderline NSFW, if you were looking to check it out.

I was scratching my head on this. Where's the buzz? What's this have that Google+ missed on?

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised too. I try to keep an eye out for these things and this is the first I've heard of it. It makes me wonder how serious they are about this.

it’s actually been around for a little while now. i remember first hearing of it about a year ago, and according to this [1] they launched a private beta back in december 2011

as for how serious they are, i’d say not really, at least in terms of building-out a viable network to compete with the likes of a facebook. i get the impression that it's more of a large-scale research effort with a focus on integrating social in a more meaningful way, particularly as it relates to search

i think this [from the source below] sums it up pretty well:

Microsoft officials have described Socl as a kind of mash-up of social-networking and search that is designed to get the learning communities to start thinking about how to use collaboration technologies in new ways. And according to the Softies and contrary to popular rumors, Socl is not an attempt to take on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler or Pinterest.

Socl combined ideas the FUSE Labs teams have pioneered in some of their other experimental projects, like Montage (a photo collage app) and Kodu (game programming). Microsoft built Socl using TypeScript, its superset of JavaScript.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-opens-its-socl-social-search-...

It can show animated gifs??

So, is it an Apple Ping 2.0? Destined to the same fate, I suppose.

Everyone agrees that we're going to call this "sock-el" right?

I can only view it as So-Chlorine.

Lotsa NSFW posts showing up when I tried it, careful...

What a waste

Sockel? Strange name.

Oh look, a G+ clone...

MS is so inept at anything "social", it's sad they even keep trying (but I guess if you have enough monkeys banging away on a keyboard long enough, they'll eventually pound out the next FB "killer").

The Messenger+Live (aka. "Messenger social" from the site itself) is a comedy of errors -- has anyone signed into that recently? It's XP meets Vista meets Win8, but mostly just the annoying parts of each. And their "social forums"[1] are the worst forums that I've ever had the privilege of ignoring.

1. http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/

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