[h=3]What is So.cl?[/h]So.cl (pronounced "social") is an experimental research project, developed by Microsoft’s FUSE Labs, focused on exploring the possibilities of social search for the purpose of learning. So.cl combines social networking and search, to help people find and share interesting web pages in the way students do when they work together. So.cl helps you create rich posts, by assembling montages of visual web content. To encourage interaction and collaboration, So.cl provides rich media sharing, and real time sharing of videos via "video parties." We expect students to continue using products such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other existing social networks, as well as Bing, Google and other search tools. We hope to encourage students to reimagine how our everyday communication and learning tools can be improved, by researching, learning and sharing in their everyday lives. [h=3]Who can join?[/h]We are formally partnering with selected schools (including University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University). However, anyone can participate in the FUSE Labs research community as several of our experiments are available for use on the web. For those who wish to be more involved with FUSE, please e-mail Socl@microsoft.com. [h=3]In So.cl, how do I share a search?[/h]By default, searches in So.cl are shared publicly. As students work together, they often search for the same items, and discover new shared interests by sharing links. We see this trend today on many social networks, such as Twitter, where shared links spread virally and amplify popular content. So.cl experiments with this concept by automatically sharing links as you search. The So.cl search experience is powered by Bing, and we use the public Bing API’s to display search result data. [h=3]How does So.cl work?[/h]The So.cl search experience is powered by Bing; we use the public Bing APIs to display search result data. As students work together, they often look for the same content, and discover new shared interests by sharing results. These results can be web pages, images, or videos found through Bing. We see this trend today on many social networks, such as Twitter, where shared links spread virally and amplify popular content. So.cl experiments with this concept by letting you easily share links as you search. [h=3]In So.cl, how do I create a rich post?[/h]So.cl makes it easy to create a beautiful post you’re proud to share. Just find interesting images and links on the web, and So.cl helps you assemble them automatically into a compelling visual montage. To explore this concept further, try our related project Montage. Example of a rich post in So.cl [h=3]In So.cl, what is a video party?[/h]Students spend time sharing videos. So.cl extends this concept by making it easy to share video parties, with So.cl friends who are online. Video parties let you search, and quickly assemble a list of movies to view together with friends. You can view any existing party collection created by any other So.cl user, or create your own, and easily chat with other So.cl users. Example of a video party in So.cl [h=3]Is So.cl data public?[/h]Yes. Unless you mark it as "private", your search results, and any other data you post to So.cl may be viewed by all other So.cl users. In addition, we will make data that was publicly posted on So.cl broadly available for use by other entities and individuals. For more information please read our Privacy Statement at http://www.so.cl/app/privacy. Public data enables new types of research and experimentation, a primary goal for So.cl. [h=3]Can I delete my data in So.cl?[/h]Yes. You have options ranging from deleting a single item, search or post, to deleting all your history, or your entire account. The data you have deleted, however, may have been included in data sets shared with third parties. Deletion of your data from So.cl will not delete entries from such data sets. For more information please read our Privacy Statement at http://www.so.cl/app/privacy. [h=3]Does it cost anything to join?[/h]No, So.cl is free. [h=3]Is So.cl a part of Bing?[/h]No, So.cl is a research project from FUSE Labs in Microsoft Research that is focused on learning more about social search. So.cl uses Bing for search data via the public API, but it is not a Bing product. [h=3]Does my So.cl data appear on Facebook?[/h]So.cl uses Facebook authentication, which means you use your Facebook account to log in, and your name and profile picture from Facebook appear in So.cl. By default we do not post any content from So.cl into your Facebook stream. If you choose, you can post content to Facebook using the share to Facebook feature in So.cl. [h=3]Why haven’t you added features commonly used in social networking and search sites such as: Facebook, Twitter, Bing, or Google?[/h]So.cl is not meant to replace existing full-featured search and social networking tools. It is an experimental research project using a minimal set of features which help combine search with the social network for the purpose of learning. [h=3]Why are you targeting students?[/h]We feel that students are the best audience to evolve and discover more about the future of online social behavior. We have been amazed by the number of courses at universities that focus on using social networking and search tools to exchange information, particularly in the Information Schools within universities. [h=3]Can So.cl be used more generally for people not focused on learning communities and academics?[/h]So.cl can be used by the general public, but it is our goal to focus on learning communities. [h=3]What are the other social experiments that you are engaged in?[/h]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. Source: http://www.so.cl/about/faq
So.cl Gives Students a New Way to Learn The web, search, and social networking are changing the way students collaborate. To bring these elements together, Microsoft Research’s FUSE Labs is launching a site designed to give students the ability to network with peers, share useful information quickly, and build their own pages that collect information from both inside and outside the classroom—in a sense, transforming the web and social networks into the new classroom. Called So.cl and pronounced “social,” the experimental research project is being made available to students in information and design schools at the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University. In time, more schools will be added, potentially expanding So.cl’s use as a learning and information-gathering tool. So.cl has been designed for students studying social media to extend their educational experience and rethink how they learn and communicate. They can build posts with many elements—photos, video, text, and more—and share them with colleagues. They also can find students with similar interests and build communities around specific educational goals. So.cl might even give students the ability to create their own social tool, customized for their own community. The researchers behind So.cl deliberately sought to collaborate with a student audience that is more holistic—encompassing representation from the sciences as well as the humanities—rather than simply technical, says Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs. http://forums.mydigitallife.net/en-us/news/features/images/socl_1.png Lili Cheng “What we’ve seen in the last year or two is innovation in the way schools are teaching and learning from students, creating new programs to study how information spreads, motivates learning, and creates expertise,” Cheng says. “A hugely popular freshman course in some schools is Social Media 101, which often leads to a project-based innovation course where students build and deploy their ideas. “These are not just computer-science students, but also business, design, or humanities students. They don’t necessarily write code, but they can be encouraged to reimagine how social software and the way people are sharing and exchanging information shapes the world. We are experimenting with So.cl to use our own tools to partner with more students and learn from students with a broad base of expertise.” So.cl reflects the fact that students today approach learning in a different manner than they did even a few years ago, says Shelly Farnham, a FUSE Labs researcher working on So.cl. http://forums.mydigitallife.net/en-us/news/features/images/socl_2.png Shelly Farnham “Today, social media is a really active part of the learning process,” Farnham says. “It’s a common story that we hear: Someone will first hear about something because their friend mentioned it on Facebook or they saw it mentioned on Twitter, and from there, they search in Wikipedia or through a search engine. Then they’ll go back and do searches within Twitter to find out not just the content of a news story, but also how their friends are responding to that news story. There’s this real sense of a conversation happening within social media around what they’re learning.” So.cl’s ability to connect students who have shared interests is important, given that students today have more varied pursuits than those in the past. As Cheng notes, it wasn’t that long ago that students involved in athletics largely played only long-established sports such as football, basketball, or baseball. Now, they also pursue paddle-boarding, breakdancing, karate, or fencing—sports not necessarily part of the school curriculum—and they use YouTube or Internet how-tos to find experts and learn. With So.cl, students can build their own communities and collections around these pursuits or anything else they enjoy. That, in turn, will help them learn more, Farnham says. Students today often choose study topics based on the passions of people with whom they connect. Subsequently, a goal of So.cl is to understand motivation and to give students a way to broaden their interests and to connect more effectively with people with similar interests. http://forums.mydigitallife.net/en-us/news/features/images/socl_3.png So.cl's user interface: clean, open, and flexible. Using So.cl will come naturally to anyone who uses the web. It has a clean, open look and lets users follow people, set up feeds, search, and more. So.cl users can follow specific people or view the entire feed stream. Searches can be webwide, confined to news feeds or specific people, or limited to only images or video. “If you’ve ever used a social network, it’s a comfortable experience,” Cheng says. “We expect people to continue using their favorite social network and search tools, and we hope that, by experimenting with how search and social networking can be combined, more people experiment with tools we already take for granted.” So.cl borrows from other FUSE Labs projects to make it easier to compile photos and videos. It has a feature derived from the content-aggregation project Montage that enables authoring of a visual collage of images, videos, and stories. Montage influenced So.cl’s ability to let users quickly assemble content from a variety of sources to build pages about particular interests. Cheng says she’s eager to see how students use So.cl. She recalls talking with students at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunication Program about the ways they engage with social media as a learning tool. She says she was shocked at their cleverness in employing it. “I was just blown away,” she says. “They are so sophisticated about the way they share, riffing off one another’s ideas, having fun, and flowing between interests. A group of students lingered after and asked us how we could stay in touch and continue to share experiments.” One of Cheng’s goals for So.cl is to create a platform on which students can experiment with their own ideas about a social network. “I am surprised by the amount of frustration and the lack of design innovation in the design of everyday tools such as search, social networking, text messaging, and email,” she says. “None of these were designed for the way students communicate, and I haven’t found anyone who really loves the way they work together. We hope to reduce some technical barriers for students who are interested in exploring something different—and show that more experimentation is needed.” So.cl got its start when Cheng and others in FUSE Labs were examining Facebook and Twitter data and how it is used in Bing. They could track URLs people were sharing on Twitter, for instance, and see how news and information were gathered and spread. “We started to think about how we could create an experience around that,” Cheng says, “about making search social and making it easy to share rich, beautiful posts without having to leave your network.” Key to that experience was taking the So.cl experience a step beyond what people have been doing. “There have been social-search projects in the past,” Farnham says, “but they’ve generally focused much more on how to improve the experience of search. In So.cl, there’s a shift in emphasis toward improving collaboration and connecting with other people around common interests.” Source: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/socl-121511.aspx
So.cl Gives Students a New Way to Learn The web, search, and social networking are changing the way students collaborate. To bring these elements together, Microsoft Research’s FUSE Labs is launching a site designed to give students the ability to network with peers, share useful information quickly, and build their own pages that collect information from both inside and outside the classroom—in a sense, transforming the web and social networks into the new classroom. Called So.cl and pronounced “social,” the experimental research project is being made available to students in information and design schools at the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University. In time, more schools will be added, potentially expanding So.cl’s use as a learning and information-gathering tool. So.cl has been designed for students studying social media to extend their educational experience and rethink how they learn and communicate. They can build posts with many elements—photos, video, text, and more—and share them with colleagues. They also can find students with similar interests and build communities around specific educational goals. So.cl might even give students the ability to create their own social tool, customized for their own community. The researchers behind So.cl deliberately sought to collaborate with a student audience that is more holistic—encompassing representation from the sciences as well as the humanities—rather than simply technical, says Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs. http://forums.mydigitallife.net/en-us/news/features/images/socl_1.png Lili Cheng “What we’ve seen in the last year or two is innovation in the way schools are teaching and learning from students, creating new programs to study how information spreads, motivates learning, and creates expertise,” Cheng says. “A hugely popular freshman course in some schools is Social Media 101, which often leads to a project-based innovation course where students build and deploy their ideas. “These are not just computer-science students, but also business, design, or humanities students. They don’t necessarily write code, but they can be encouraged to reimagine how social software and the way people are sharing and exchanging information shapes the world. We are experimenting with So.cl to use our own tools to partner with more students and learn from students with a broad base of expertise.” So.cl reflects the fact that students today approach learning in a different manner than they did even a few years ago, says Shelly Farnham, a FUSE Labs researcher working on So.cl. http://forums.mydigitallife.net/en-us/news/features/images/socl_2.png Shelly Farnham “Today, social media is a really active part of the learning process,” Farnham says. “It’s a common story that we hear: Someone will first hear about something because their friend mentioned it on Facebook or they saw it mentioned on Twitter, and from there, they search in Wikipedia or through a search engine. Then they’ll go back and do searches within Twitter to find out not just the content of a news story, but also how their friends are responding to that news story. There’s this real sense of a conversation happening within social media around what they’re learning.” So.cl’s ability to connect students who have shared interests is important, given that students today have more varied pursuits than those in the past. As Cheng notes, it wasn’t that long ago that students involved in athletics largely played only long-established sports such as football, basketball, or baseball. Now, they also pursue paddle-boarding, breakdancing, karate, or fencing—sports not necessarily part of the school curriculum—and they use YouTube or Internet how-tos to find experts and learn. With So.cl, students can build their own communities and collections around these pursuits or anything else they enjoy. That, in turn, will help them learn more, Farnham says. Students today often choose study topics based on the passions of people with whom they connect. Subsequently, a goal of So.cl is to understand motivation and to give students a way to broaden their interests and to connect more effectively with people with similar interests. http://forums.mydigitallife.net/en-us/news/features/images/socl_3.png So.cl's user interface: clean, open, and flexible. Using So.cl will come naturally to anyone who uses the web. It has a clean, open look and lets users follow people, set up feeds, search, and more. So.cl users can follow specific people or view the entire feed stream. Searches can be webwide, confined to news feeds or specific people, or limited to only images or video. “If you’ve ever used a social network, it’s a comfortable experience,” Cheng says. “We expect people to continue using their favorite social network and search tools, and we hope that, by experimenting with how search and social networking can be combined, more people experiment with tools we already take for granted.” So.cl borrows from other FUSE Labs projects to make it easier to compile photos and videos. It has a feature derived from the content-aggregation project Montage that enables authoring of a visual collage of images, videos, and stories. Montage influenced So.cl’s ability to let users quickly assemble content from a variety of sources to build pages about particular interests. Cheng says she’s eager to see how students use So.cl. She recalls talking with students at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunication Program about the ways they engage with social media as a learning tool. She says she was shocked at their cleverness in employing it. “I was just blown away,” she says. “They are so sophisticated about the way they share, riffing off one another’s ideas, having fun, and flowing between interests. A group of students lingered after and asked us how we could stay in touch and continue to share experiments.” One of Cheng’s goals for So.cl is to create a platform on which students can experiment with their own ideas about a social network. “I am surprised by the amount of frustration and the lack of design innovation in the design of everyday tools such as search, social networking, text messaging, and email,” she says. “None of these were designed for the way students communicate, and I haven’t found anyone who really loves the way they work together. We hope to reduce some technical barriers for students who are interested in exploring something different—and show that more experimentation is needed.” So.cl got its start when Cheng and others in FUSE Labs were examining Facebook and Twitter data and how it is used in Bing. They could track URLs people were sharing on Twitter, for instance, and see how news and information were gathered and spread. “We started to think about how we could create an experience around that,” Cheng says, “about making search social and making it easy to share rich, beautiful posts without having to leave your network.” Key to that experience was taking the So.cl experience a step beyond what people have been doing. “There have been social-search projects in the past,” Farnham says, “but they’ve generally focused much more on how to improve the experience of search. In So.cl, there’s a shift in emphasis toward improving collaboration and connecting with other people around common interests.” Source: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/socl-121511.aspx
Introducing the new So.cl Translator After launching So.cl we were pleasantly surprised to see how well it resonated with non-English native speakers. In the short time since, the site has received attention from users all over the world, adding to the richness and diversity of the So.cl content stream. To support our growing community we took advantage of a great asset with the Bing Translator API, and we are happy to announce that So.cl now has built in translation. With this update you can connect with people from across the globe in 37 different languages, making collaboration easier than ever. To apply this feature to a post, click on the menu arrow in the upper right corner and select “Translate.” A box will appear where you can select your language, see image below. Click the orange “Translate” button, and the post will automatically translate into your chosen language! You can also set your default translation language on the language tab in your setting panel. To get to the settings panel, click on your profile image in the top right corner of the page and click “settings”. We hope the new translation feature will add to your experience and ability to collaborate and share information.