A new player has entered the arena! The field already being filled with the heavyweight hitting Facebook, fast jabbing Twitter, and the rookie Google+. What about Myspace? For staying with the metaphor sake, Myspace is the old, has-been veteran. We don’t know too much about this newcomer but here is what we do know. Last Wednesday there has been a report circulating around the web of Microsoft’s purchase of a domain name of Socl.com. One day later, Microsoft “unintentionally” released a teaser page of a social search service called Tulalip. Opps. It was then swiftly taken out. If you go to that site it now has a cute little message that reads “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”.
Whether this was a publicity stunt or not, it did its job. Word caught on and its spreading throughout the web.So all we can go off on is the page that the Microsoft leaked. The welcome message for the login page reads: With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever. We also see Facebook and Twitter login buttons. Further digging showed that with Tulalip could post tweets and update your profile through its service. Is it a social search engine? Is it a new social networking site? Is it a hybrid of both? Or is a social networking management site like Hootsuite? It is all speculation right now. But one thing is for sure. Microsoft’s Tulalip will have to offer something of value that isnt’ been already offered by big social media websites. A little fun information, Tulalip is the name of a local Native American tribe in Washington. I’m sure there is little or no correlation between the two entities.