news Microsoft to close its social network on a week's notice – and SIX people complain

[Kate]

Microsoft to close its social network on a week's notice – and SIX people complain
Low-profile So.cl was an experiment, not a flop. Promise

Microsoft will close So.cl, its very low-key social network, on March 15.

Microsoft soft-launched So.cl to students only in May 2012 and billed it as an “experiment in social search” because posts always started with a Bing search. The service was made available to anyone in December 2012 and then … crickets.

The service has scarcely been heard of since and if Microsoft has ever revealed user numbers, it appears to have done so in private. Statistics-selling service Statista doesn't include So.Cl on its list of the 22 most-used social networks, so it seems safe to assume that So.cl had fewer than 49 million users, the figure attached to messaging called Kakaotalk. Probably orders of magnitude fewer.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/microsoft_closes_so_cl_social_network/

 

[Acroplex]

In other news, I re-downloaded ICQ It's now owned by a Russian company. Those were the days!

 

[Addison]

so it seems safe to assume that So.cl had fewer than 49 million users, the figure attached to messaging called Kakaotalk. Probably orders of magnitude fewer.

Obviously: https://www.similarweb.com/website/so.cl

Microsoft and Google will have to spend a couple billion to acquire another company if they ever want to participate in social media. They can't build one from scratch that's worth a dime.