Tulalip project leaked to the network

Just yesterday, there was a funny story, which today retell all the major information portals. What you see above is all that remains of the main page of socl.com , where the inscription says: “Thank you for stopping. Socl.com is an internal design project from the Microsoft Research team that was published by mistake online. We didn’t want it, really. ”

That's just the truth is not very similar, especially given the words that we see in the screenshot: "With Tulalip, you can find what you need and share what you know easier than ever." The Fusible resource that first came across this site discovered that Tulalip is the name of the first tribes that settled near Redmond, where Microsoft's headquarters are currently located.

All at once remembered Ballmer's words that “nobody needs another Facebook” because The project is designed in a social theme - this is indicated not only by the design, but also by the buttons for entering the site using Twitter and Facebook accounts. But the words written with capital letters in the greeting hint that this is a certain superstructure over Bing (which is socialized by leaps and bounds, already offering individual results), allowing to share the found content. At the same time, given the possibility of integration with the accounts of the two most popular networks today, it is possible that this is about aggregating social content into a third platform, in this case Tulalip itself. As you know, if you can not win - join.
')
The homepage was removed very quickly, and Microsoft has stated several times that it was an “incident”. Although to me personally this seems more like a “breakdown of the pen”, removed due to undue attention.

It is worth noting that the company has other projects in the field of social networks (with the exception of, in fact, the networks themselves). For example, the Spindex prototype aggregates social news feeds, its feature is to find popular themes — trends, making it not based on topics that are popular throughout the system (like “top trends” on Twitter), but processing “friends” to make it easier understand what information is popular among your contacts.

If Microsoft wanted to enter the social media market, the product would be very carefully positioned, since the giant from Redmond has sufficient experience in this area. Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail are able to provide a large number of subscribers from scratch, already connected to each other.

But, as already mentioned, this is most likely another service from the series “we aggregate everything, we share our favorites.” A lot of work has already been done to make Windows Live the final stop for users of all social networks (except, perhaps, the same Twitter, from which it is impossible to exhaust everything because of the policy prescribed in the licensing terms of service), in the absence of a social network from Microsoft itself.

Fusible via TechCrunch via ArsTechnica