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Microsoft social network, Socl, is set to shut down by the end of the month.

Microsoft has announced that it will be permanently shutting down its social networking service, Socl, next week.

Socl, developed by FUSE Labs, will cease to be on March 15th, according to a blog post on the much forgotten social networking site.

The social network was launched in 2011 and was designed to be a collaboration tool as opposed to a communication platform. Initially targeted towards students, before a wider roll out, the platform allowed users to share creative content such as picture collages or short videos in a method not dissimilar from Pintrest.

In a farewell blog post the social network said: Soclhas been a wonderful outlet for creative expression, as well as aplace to enjoy a supportive community of like-minded people, sharing and learning together. In supporting you, Socls unique community of creators, we have learned invaluable lessons in what it takes to establish and maintain community as well as introduce novel new ways to make, share and collectdigital stuff welove.

When details of the service first emerged in 2011 many believed it would be a competitor to Facebook as many large tech companies, seeing the potential of facebook, began dabbling in social networking, such as Google with its Google Buzz platform in 2010.

The social networking site fell into relative obscurity after failing to gain significant traction among its audience. One of the more bizarre features of the system is that it required a Facebook login to use the service, essentially making it a Facebook add-on.

After 6 years, 5 years longer than Google Buzz, the social network will go offline permanently next week.

The blog post ended on an optimistic note that said: From the very beginning, weve been amazed by your creativity, openness, and positivity. Thank you so very much for sharing your inspirations with us.

See the article here:
Anti Socl Microsoft kills social network - Computer Business Review

Like bizzaro Facebooks, Tagged and Hi5 launched in 2004 to help you meet new people instead of connecting you with friends you already know. Through social games and paid dating features, they earned a surprising amount of revenue despite being relatively unknown. Tagged bought Hi5 in 2011 before branching out into standalone social app development and renamed the parent company If(we).

But after Taggeds newer apps fell flat, its now decided to sell for $60 million in cash to MeetMe, a fellow social discovery network formerly known as myYearbook that went public in 2014. Tagged and Hi5 will remain their own distinct brands.

Tagged had originally planned to go public itself before the shift to mobile led to a precipitous drop-off of its desktop properties. If(we) managed to pull in $44 million in revenue in 2016, with mobile revenue up 56 percent in a year as it began to follow its users to smartphones. If(we) ended the year with 5.4 million monthly users. It says its still adding 18,000 users per day. The startup had raised $28.7 million, including a $15 million round in 2012 from Lighthouse Capital Partners and Comerica Bank.

Taggeds old homepage, courtesy ofAppAppeal

By joining forces with MeetMe, the combined company will have 10.6 million total monthly users, and nearly 1.1 million daily users in the U.S. MeetMe expects If(we) to add $9 million in adjusted EBITDA to its earnings over the next 12 months. MeetMe will fund the buyout with cash on hand, revenue, earnings and a $30 million loan from JP Morgan.

The markets responded favorably, sending its share price up 19 percent in after-hours trading to hover around $6.

We believe this combination provides a clear pathway to $150 million in annualized revenue with adjusted EBITDA of $50 million for our combined company, saidGeoff Cook, CEO of MeetMe.

MeetMes mobile social discovery app

Greg Tseng, Taggeds founder who stepped back from daily operations, tells TechCrunch, They did a great job with the Skout acquisition so that gave us confidence in combining. MeetMe bought the location-focused social discovery network Skout in June. He says MeetMe also plans to invest in live video.

Given that Tagged, Hi5 and MeetMe all try to turn strangers into friends or more, bringing them together rather than competing could save them money on product development and marketing.

All three companies were/are doing similar things so it makes a lot of sense to combine and the market is reacting very well to it, Tseng concludes.

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Old-school social networks Tagged and Hi5 bought by MeetMe for $60M - TechCrunch

There were 203 Russians reportedly convicted for online speech crimes in 2015, and roughly half of those were for posting, sharing, or liking something on Russias Facebook clone, VK.com.

As a result, many Russians seem to be moving into a post-social-networking era. Specifically, they are turning to Telegram, an encrypted messaging service founded by Pavel Durov, the same person who started VK but was later forced out and became an open critic of the Kremlin.

Despite being developed as a messaging service, Telegram has been able to approximate a very basic social network. The services channels have been compared to newsletters, where authors build a subscriber base and following for their missives. Users cant chat in a channel or interact directly with its authors unless the author explicitly shares their Telegram username, which means less noise in the channels. Users can still share posts, however, which means memes and popular posts can still spread fast. Authors can grow a substantial following similar to YouTube or Facebook, although much smaller Telegram claims to have 100 million users, but even recommended channels have fewer than 50,000 followers. The ecosystem is also disjointed, with no central search engine and no good way to discover new channels without following a bot or looking at lists on the web.

Telegram isnt completely secure. There has been at least one report alleging that the Kremlin cracked Telegram, and its certainly not the most secure messaging app on the market. The Russian government also reportedly collaborated with a cell phone operator to take over two activists accounts in 2016.

So why do Russians prefer Telegram to the widely trusted encrypted messaging app Signal, or other messaging services that are more secure? The reason is the emphasis on publishing.

Anyone can log in and start a channel, but the interface is extremely minimal basically, it looks like crap. To make up for this, Telegram invites developers to make add-ons for its platform, including clients, and bots that let users add stickers, font styling, links, and polls. Authors can also use Telegrams service Telegra.ph, which is essentially a clone of Facebook Instant Articles.

Journalists and people working in media were the first to start posting in channels some anonymously, most by name. In some cases, their individual following is higher than the number of people subscribed to the official accounts of news organizations, many of which have their own channels on Telegram.

Today, Telegram has a great variety of channels. You can subscribe to skill channels and learn Excel in GIFs or find out about digital-marketing from professionals working in the industry. There is even a channel for a guy working as a surveyor and looking for oil in the Arctic, and one led by an aspiring doctor writing about medicine for millennials.

The app also supports a number of channels around delicate topics including drugs, raving, sex, and politics. Traditional shakedown near the Rodnya club, be ready, one techno channel posted, alerting its users.

There is also support for those dealing with mental illness. Psychostory is a channel allegedly run by a 25-year-old woman struggling with depression. I met with one of my subscribers today, she was in a state psychiatric clinic in her childhood, a recent post read in Russian. She told me that no one really cared about the kids with suicidal tendencies there, they just took all the sharp things away from them. Those children found rough walls lacked renovation and rubbed themselves to blood which sometime stayed unwashed for days. The author of this channel announced in February that she has a book contract with one of the biggest publishing houses in Russia. This is the first book from a Telegram channel, she wrote.

Even if you dont get a book deal, its possible to monetize a channel on Telegram with ads. The service doesnt have an official ad network, but it does have a primitive black market. Advertisers contact the owner of a channel to negotiate, and at least anecdotally, the clickthrough rates are good.

For many, Telegram is primarily a source of news. The information there is sometimes reliable, often not, and its difficult to tell but the app has been praised for circumventing the traditional state-controlled media.

Telegram hasnt escaped the Kremlins notice. In January, authorities were reportedly exploring ways to identify users of messaging apps including Telegram, WhatsApp, and Viber by regulating SIM card contracts. Then in February, some channel authors reportedly attended an unofficial meeting with Roskomnadzor. Afterward, one of the channel authors, who specializes in the intersection of politics and information technology, said that officials wanted to know more about how exactly Telegram works.

If anonymity is truly compromised on Telegram, much of its appeal for Russians will go away. Even though there is no way to vet sources of information on the app, its a thriving alternative to the increasingly censored web, where a user can go to jail for sharing a meme.

Andrey Urodov is a freelance journalist and the publisher of the magazine Russia Without Us.

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Russians are using Telegram like a - The Outline

While everyone was flabbergasted with the idea of social networking and Facebook was gaining importance, other technology giants also tried dipping their toes into the said ecosystem. One such social experiment So.Cl (pronounced social) came from the fun people at Microsoft Research FUSE Labs. But, the platform failed to gain traction and is now closing down after a five-year-long stint.

Microsoft debuted the said platform back in 2011, with the aim of providing consumers with a collaborative platform rather than the usual communication stack. It allowed them tocreate, collect and share everything from rich visual collages to short animated video (now known to us GIF). These posts or collections could be shared on So.Cl, as well as other existing social platforms as well.

When theplatform made its initial debut for students, before a wider roll out, it was being closely compared to Facebook or Twitter. It was being seen as Microsofts attempt to build a social network to take the competitors head-on. But, the company never intended the collaborative service to rival them as So.Cl itself used Facebook login to onboard users. Also, the visual and media-focused approach it followedwas reminiscent to Pinterest boards, if nothing else.

So.Cl quietly continued to exist on the interweb and mobile for a period longer than most wouldve imagined. The platform failed in its mission to redesign and enhance the social experience through the said approach. Thus, it is now going offline within a weeks time, on March 15. In an official blog post, FUSE Labs bid farewell to the experimental social network as under:

So.cl has been a wonderful outlet for creative expression, as well as a place to enjoy a supportive community of like-minded people, sharing and learning together. In supporting you, So.cls unique community of creators, we have learned invaluable lessons in what it takes to establish and maintain community as well as introduce novel new ways to make, share and collect digital stuff we love.

[emailprotected]

Continue reading here:
Microsoft is shuttering its little-known experimental social network 'So.Cl' - The Tech Portal

Many argue that we are now connected more than ever. Human beings can have conversations with one another in an instant regardless of location or time zone thanks to social media. American psychologists recently determined, however, that social media sites have only intensified experiences of social isolation.

Psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine examined the use of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr. The team questioned 2,000 adults between the ages of nineteen and thirty-two. The study concluded that adults who spend more than two hours a day on social media were more than twice as likely to have feelings of loneliness.

The team theorizes that adults who spend more time on social media in turn spend less time on real-world interactions. Users can also feel excluded if they see pictures of their friends at an event that they were not invited to. To top it off, people tend to only post the best parts of their life on social media. Most who spend more time on sites like Instagram and Facebook are only looking at idealized versions of another persons life.

This is not the first time, and certainly will not be the last time, that the Internet is blamed for a variety of social ills. One 2014 study debunked the rumor that video games themselves caused violence, but revealed losing a game can increase aggression.

Read more from the original source:
Psychologists Claim Social Networking Sites Cause Higher Levels Of Loneliness - Hot Hardware