about Socl

Socl — pronounced social — lets you create, collect and share stuff you love. From rich visual collages to short animated media, express yourself through posts that take seconds to create, collect and share (on Socl, as well as Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter).

Socl is brought to you by the fun people at Microsoft Research FUSE Labs. We look forward to enjoying what you create today.

Happy making!

In the August 2014 update to Socl, we have provided lots of new capabilities for our community.

Socl offers a suite of simple and fun post Creation Experiences that make it easy to express and share your ideas with people worldwide. These Creation Experiences include:

Yes, simply go to Socl on your mobile device or to your device's app store; the site's responsive design will optimize for your device.

Every Socl user has a profile page which is created once you've signed in on Socl using your Facebook or Microsoft account. Y our profile is easily accessible from the main navigation bar.

From your profile page, you can:

• See all the posts you have created, filtered by type (collages, video parties, picotales and blinks)
• Manage the collections you follow
• Manage the people you follow
• Update your profile information (picture and bio)

Collections are sets of posts which you can follow that are organized around post content – when you see a post you like on Socl, collect it – either to your own collection or to a collection to which you and some friends or everyone on Socl contributes.

Follow collections to tune your Socl feed. By following a collection, you are expressing affinity with that content or the people posting to that collection. Over time, your following feed will show you posts from the collections and people you follow and provide opportunities to follow new, related content and people.

Moderators are collection curators. Every Socl collection has at least one moderator who comes from the Socl community. Moderators have the ability to edit the title, description and tags of a collection. Moderators may also remove inappropriate or off topic posts from a collection at their discretion.

You can become a collection moderator in a variety of ways. Of course, if you create a me collection, you are the moderator. The creator of a personal collection can also invite moderators to join them in contributing to the collection (those invited will receive a notification that they've been invited to moderate which they can choose to accept or decline). In the case of everyone collections, the original creator is designated moderator, but from that point on moderator designation is based on active participation in the collection. Active participants in a collection can eventually replace original moderators based on participation in and contribution to the quality of that collection.

Your following feed shows you only posts from people or collections you have chosen to follow. The everyone feed features posts from everyone on Socl and is a great place to hang out to meet new people or learn new things. If we think you might be interested in a person or a collection we'll give you an opportunity to do so, right from the feed.

A riff on Socl is a visual response to a post, usually extending the original post in some manner and providing a way to continue a conversation visually. All the posts in a riff are viewable together using "view riffs” – the post that inspires the riff is clearly marked and attribution is also given to the riff post as well.

Collage is powered by Bing; we use the public Bing APIs to display search results. When people want to express themselves on Socl, they look for great content on the web and share the results in the form of a post collage. These results can be web pages, images, or videos found through Bing or found while simply browsing the web and shared with the Socl community (the Socl bookmarklet makes this easy to do). Posts can be collected and tagged to aid discovery and discussion.

Yes, or you can use images hosted on services such as OneDrive if the images you'd like to post are accessible through a public link. Simply paste the link to the images into the 'paste a link' field in the collage post creator and they will appear just like Bing search results, ready to drag and drop into your collage.

It's easy to share posts on Socl. Just click “share” at the base of the post and choose the network you'd like to share to (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr). Or, share the post via email.

Blink uses the Microsoft Account for authentication; you may be using Facebook to sign in to Socl. You can link your accounts by following a few easy steps in the settings page. Once linked, you will be able to sign in to your unified Socl account by logging in with either Facebook or Microsoft account.

The Socl bookmarklet provides an easy way to share a link on the web to Socl. Click here to add the Socl bookmarklet to your browser.

Posts on Socl are public by default but new with the August 2014 update, you can choose to set the visibility of your posts to be public, only me, or me and others.

Public data enables new types of research and experimentation, and is a primary goal for Socl. Your post and any other data you post to Socl publicly may be viewed by all other Socl users. In addition, data publicly posted on Socl can be used by other entities and individuals.

For more information please read our Privacy Statement at http://www.so.cl/app/privacy.

Yes. You have options ranging from deleting a single item, comment, or post, to deleting all your history, or your entire account. Deleted data may however have been included in data sets shared with third parties; deletion of your data from Socl will not delete entries from such data sets. For more information please read our Privacy Statement at http://www.so.cl/app/privacy.

Anyone can join Socl; Socl is free.

No, not unless you choose to share to Facebook.

Socl uses two services for authentication, or sign in: the Microsoft account or Facebook.

If you choose to use Facebook authentication – which means you use your Facebook account to sign in – your name and profile picture from Facebook will appear in Socl by default.

By default we do not post any content from Socl into your Facebook stream. If you choose, you can post content to Facebook using the share to Facebook feature in Socl.

Socl is actually quite complementary to such sites. Socl features a suite of “apps” which enable people to express and share ideas through a variety of post types, organized into collections Posts on Socl are extremely easy to create and share (on Socl and on other networks).