Microsoft Research today quietly launched its social network Socl on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. You can download the new apps now directly from Google Play, Apple’s App Store, and the Windows Phone Store.
Socl was first created purely as a research project, but Microsoft has been adding features to it and tweaking it for years. Now the social experiment has finally been ported from desktop to mobile, as first spotted by WMPoweruser.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the app is largely the same across the three mobile platforms. Given that the trio was released simultaneously, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the feature list is identical for all three:
- Create beautiful collages and funny memes in seconds.
- Share your creations on Socl, as well as your other favorite social networks.
- Create visual responses (“riffs”) to existing content.
- Snap a picture and share it on Socl.
- Receive notifications about community activity on the content you love.
- Organize the content you love in collections.
- Connect with new and interesting people worldwide.
For those who have never heard of it, Socl (pronounced simply “social”) lets you create, collect, and share content from rich visual collages to short animated media and memes. Content can be aggregated directly on Socl, as well as on Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter.
At any given time, the Socl site mainly shows content from Microsoft employees. Clearly the team is hoping that by launching mobile apps, it can finally expand its test to a broader audience; so far, Socl is fun to play around with, but few users actually stick around for long.
To use Socl, you need a Microsoft account or be willing to connect with Facebook. The app lets you access the Socl service, but you can also share content from Socl to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr. The app has a Windows Phone vibe, but isn't really offensive in an Android context. It is pretty laggy on the Nexus 5, though
This isn't actually a new service – Microsoft opened it up to public signups back in May of 2012. So if you need one more social network to keep up with, Microsoft has you covered. Maybe now that it has an Android app, Socl will take right off. Right?
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