Microsoft is officially launching So.cl. It turns out that it is not Microsoft’s version of Facebook, but a social networking service for students built on top of Facebook. The service is still on “experimental” stage. According to Microsoft Research’s FUSE Labs, So.cl is a social network designed to enable students to share useful information in a fast way and to help students to create their own pages with content from inside and outside the classroom.
In that sense, it is transforming the web and social networks in the new class room in order that “students study the social media and thus broaden their educational experience and rethink how they learn and communicate.”
According to Microsoft, So.cl is an experimental research project and design information for students of the University of Washington, Syracuse University and University of New York. However, the company says that over time more will be added to educational sites and will expand as a tool for learning and information gathering.
Through this website students can create ‘post’ with “many” elements, photos, videos, texts, among other things. Also, students can find So.cl similar interests with others and create your own community around a specific educational level. It also includes the ‘Video Party’ option, which allows users to watch YouTube videos while social-networking, simultaneous with a ‘chat’. So far, only works with YouTube and is not known to be included other services such as Vimeo or Daily Motion.
For their part, for the laboratory researcher working Fuse So.cl., Shelly Farnham, “today’s students often choose topics of study based on the passions of the people you are connected.” Therefore, the objective of So.cl “is to understand the motivation and give students a way to expand their interests and connect more effectively with people of similar interests.”
And, the So.cl user interface will be “open, fair and flexible”. Similarly, “allows users to track people, configure feeds, searches,” among others, as these users can still see certain people or complete the feed stream. Similarly, searches can be confining webwide through news channels or specific individuals.
On the other hand, So.cl also borrows other projects of this laboratory to make it “easier” means the collection of photos and videos. Moreover, this social network allows users to mount “up” to the content of a variety of sources to create pages of particular interest.
