Microsoft quietly launched their own fledgling social network, So.Cl, which is meant to make searching the web and research in general a bit more special.

The new social network claims to be targeted to students who want to search online together, but anyone can sign up, add some interests to their feed, and try it out. The strange thing is you'll need to log in with your Facebook or Windows Live account to get started. Once you're logged in, you can edit your interests so people searching for topics in those areas will appear in your activity feed, and you can follow any of your Facebook friends who are using So.Cl.

To share your searchers, you just need to type in a search term at the top of the window. You'll see standard Bing search results, and your search will also be published to your activity feed so others can see what you're researching.

Right now however, your activity feed will be populated by people linking their own articles, posting random quotes and images, and typing into the "status update" bar and pressing enter to see what happens.

And similar to Google+'s Hangouts, So.Cl also has a video party option, where you can start a YouTube video or playlist of videos and invite friends to chat with you while you watch them. You can open the party to the public, and anyone can sit in, watch videos, and discuss.

So. Cl is definitely a young product at work. There isn't any mobile apps at the moment so the design is very desktop-oriented. It doesn't really serve a purpose amongst the other social networks which already do plenty for its users. Nevertheless I suppose it's worth a try. Have you tried it?

Still can't grasp the idea around the new social network by Microsoft? Watch the video below to get a better picture on the product: