So.cl

» see so.cl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

microsoft built a social network, and the fact that you are surprised to hear it is the whole point. so.cl came out of Microsoft Research's FUSE Labs in late '11, aimed at students in the United States, first at a handful of universities and then to anyone. it never reached me and it never reached most people, which is not a regional accident this time. it barely reached anyone anywhere.

the idea was at least a little different. it was not built for chatting, it was built around search, so you would post the results of a search and string them together into a kind of collage, then gather people around a topic or a class. Microsoft called it collaborative consumption rather than communication. underneath, the thing that gives the game away is that it used a Facebook login to sign you up. you were building on the yard of the company you were supposed to be competing with.

so it sat there for years, an experiment that a research lab kept quietly running past the point where anyone expected it to become a product. no scandal, no rush of users, no moment. just a small odd site with a name missing its vowels.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

the vowel-dropped name, so.cl, was meant to look modern in the era when every startup filed the letters off its own word. on Microsoft it read less like a hip web address and more like a spreadsheet cell. the whole thing had the air of a big company trying to sound young and landing somewhere just off. it wanted to be where students argued about ideas and mostly it was where a search demo went to live.

~ what it became ~

Microsoft announced on 7 March '17 that it would close so.cl the following week, on the 15th. by then the last real update was years behind it and closing the door changed nothing anyone could feel. it was not folded into a bigger product or reborn under a new name. it was simply switched off, and the interesting part is not that it failed but that it lasted five years while failing so quietly.

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