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The Microsoft social network hasn’t been exactly a well-kept secret as details about this service have surfaced on the web several times prior to today’s announcement. The company has officially introduced the SOCL social network that was previously codenamed Tulalip and it’s not exactly what we thought it was going to be.

So.cl can be accessed right away and it’s an interesting concept that will allow students to access the same searches between them. This social network is powered by Bing and students just have to sign up and begin searching. Microsoft follows the same pattern as Facebook which began as a social networking services for universities, and now it’s one of the biggest websites in the world.

We were pretty surprised to find out that Microsoft has devised an evil plan that will allow your friends to automatically see what are you searching for. So.cl gives you the possibility to add friends, but like said, it just shares your searches to your friends and they’ll be able to see if you found exactly what you wanted to know.

“Tulalip” has a good side, too. Many users are complaining about Google’s search engine technology as there are many people who simply cannot find useful results. Microsoft’s So.cl service relies on the idea that people might search for the same thing and if one of your friends found exact what he was looking for, then why wouldn’t you follow the example and save time while searching through the results.

Microsoft has only a few partners to raise the awareness of its social network including the University of Washington, Syracise, and New York University. Many others will follow soon and anybody can request an invite to So.cl though it’s very unlikely that you will get one anytime in the near future or at least until the company will bring more universities aboard Tulalip’s train.

Even though the Redmond company likes to call SOCL a social network, many people will hardly find and resemblances to such a service as you cannot upload your pics or videos. Users can only make a collage of pics from Bing image search, while the Video Party tool doesn’t allow you to have online video conferences – you can only chat with your friends while watching a video from YouTube or somewhere else.

So.cl is in the limited beta phase and we don’t think that people will rush into subscribing to this social network, unlike the situation of Google+ when millions of internauts asked for an invitation. Anyway, the source link is below and you know what to do from there.