Socl.com, a domain name recently purchased by Microsoft, briefly posted a landing page for a service called Tulalip. While it’s now been taken down, Tulalip seems intended as a social search feature from Microsoft.
The Tulalip Blip on the Radar
Earlier this month, J.B. at Fusible found out that the site Socl.com had been bought by Microsoft. A domain name purchase would be less interesting, though, if it wasn’t for the site attached. Socl.com hosted a teaser page for a service called Tulalip.
Tulalip, the name of the Native American tribes near Microsoft’s Redmond office, seems to be a social search feature integrated with Twitter and Facebook. Describing its purpose, the Tulalip page stated, “With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever.” However, the links on the home page weren’t functional.
What’s more, if you go to Socl.com now, you won’t see anything. Rather, you’ll get this message: “Thanks for stopping by. Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn’t mean to, honest.”
But for an “internal design project,” this site seems very advanced and very in-tune with Bing’s vision of a more social approach to accessing data on the web. And do you really need a “terms of service” for an internal project?
For now, Tulalip and Socl.com are mysteries. Bing may be taking the “accidental release” line as a way to avoid too much digging, or it may legitimately be intended as a service only for one of their teams.
Meanwhile, Socl.com, if not intended for Tulalip, is still a property owned by Microsoft and one that clearly has a social connotation. In any case, we’re not likely to learn more about this social search site until Microsoft intentionally publishes something to their newly purchased domain name.