So.cl from Microsoft review by MIT’s Technology Review:

It’s a well-made reinvention of the basic design shared by the major social networks, centered on Microsoft’s Bing Web search engine. Most posts on the site start as queries typed into the search box at the top of the page. The top few results can be shared with friends, and images turned up through a Bing search can be turned into a slick collage to be shared. Regular text-based status updates and comments can be posted too, but friends on So.cl are more followers, in the model of Twitter.

Cheng [Microsoft researcher who led development of So.cl] and colleagues got started on So.cl by thinking about how students use both Web search and social networking to find information for classes, and when working together, she says. “The tools that students use were each designed separately,” says Cheng. “We’re trying to imagine how they could fit together and change the way learning happens.”

Cheng remains adamant that So.cl is about learning, and not a warm-up to the launch of a general-interest social network that will go up against Twitter and Facebook. “The project isn’t specifically for formal learning, but learning as a general activity on any topic,” she says, “[So.cl] is one way you might combine search and social networking around learning.”

Wonder how this will fare, especially targeted to students and with the intended use already changing.