about Socl

Socl — pronounced social — allows you to express your ideas through rich post collages that take seconds to create and are easy to collect, comment upon, and share (on Socl and to other social networks).

The best way to get help with Socl is to visit the Socl blog or see if your question is answered by the community in the Socl Tips Collection. You may also visit our Getting Started page.

Socl lets you create, collect and share stuff you love. Socl is a research project from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs that began as an experiment in social search targeted at students for the purpose of learning. Following the lead of the Socl community, Socl has since evolved to be a service where people connect over shared interests expressed through beautiful post collages which are organized into group or individually curated collections.

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. Are you a foodie? If so, visit the Food Collection to see posts on food and connect with people who share your passion. Is football your thing? Create a collection of posts about your favorite team and others will likely join in. From food to football; animated gifs to animals – you’ll likely find the topic on Socl and enjoy connecting with like-minded 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.

Socl posts are typically collages of images, links, and videos found on the web and annotated with titles and captions. Socl makes it easy to create a beautiful post you’re proud to share. Simply use the post creator to find interesting images, links and videos on the web and the post creator will do the rest – your selections will be automatically assembled into a compelling collage in just seconds. Some of the unique capabilities of the post creator are:

• Drag and drop creation and layout
• Easy resize of images
• Shuffle, for single click collage layout changes
• Share to your favorite social networks, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and Twitter.

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

From your profile page, you can:

• See all the posts you have created
• Manage the collections you follow
• Manage the people you follow
• Update your profile information (picture and bio)

For privacy reasons, your Microsoft Account photo is not available for Socl to use. In order to have a profile photo when signing in with your Microsoft account, update your Socl profile to link to a profile picture available on the internet (such as a Skydrive public folder).

Socl is an open social network where people connect around posts and choose to follow people, collections, or both. While you may discover some of your Facebook friends on Socl, you will more likely discover new people or topics you’d like to follow. Of course, you can invite your friends to join you on Socl by sharing posts to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr or email or simply by sending them an invitation. If you choose to sign in using Facebook, your Facebook friends on Socl are easily visible from the find friends menu item shown below.

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.

A riff in 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.

The Socl post creation experience 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.

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.

While Socl does not yet have a photo upload feature, it is fairly simple to use your own images to make a rich post.

If the images you’d like to post are accessible through a public link, as is often the case with file storage services such as Skydrive, simply paste the link to the images into the post creator and they will appear just like Bing search results. Then, select the images you like to create your collage.

Here is a folder in Skydrive:

Creating a link to the folder in Skydrive:

Paste the link into the Socl’s Post Creator:

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 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 unique creation experience which enables people to express and share ideas through rich visual collages, organized into collections. Posts on Socl are extremely easy to create and share (on Socl and on other networks).

Other ongoing experiments include:

• Kodu: teaches kids programming and creativity on the XBox and PC.
• Montage: creates a visual album of the web on the topics you care about.
• Docs: lets you discover, create and share documents with your friends, coworkers, and classmates on Facebook.
• or see more projects from FUSE Labs.

These projects are experiments from Microsoft Research, and like other research projects, you should not expect that these projects will be supported by a Microsoft product team.

A Video Party is a shared video experience on Socl. Socl lets you search and quickly assemble a list of videos to view and chat about together, in real time if you like. You can create your own party, or join an existing party created by another person.

Socl t-shirts are available for purchase here.