Okay Geek Farm
Tulalip is Microsoft's secret social project
Ricardo Trejo
The mindset at Microsoft must be something like, “Google is a search engine company and they’ve got 10 million users on Google +, why can’t an OS developer do the same?” The world of computing in the big leagues is more about copying the other guy at an already existing idea rather than coming up with a new and exciting, innovative concept. In this case, Microsoft has accidentally blown the lid off a “secret” social project that would connect users with the live tile UI seen on Windows Phone 7 and the upcoming Windows 8.
The splash page seen above was first uncovered on Socl.com, a short-term reference to the word social (haha, get it?). The page clearly shows login via facebook connect and twitter sign in, so this apparently wouldn’t be a go ahead competition against either of them. But the wording “With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever” gives us the feeling that it would be Bing’s version of Google’s +1 “like feature”.
Microsoft has since removed the splash page and replaced it with a quite bland text message saying:
“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.”
A weak attempt to hide the scent away from people if you ask me. We’ll undoubtedly hear more about this “secret” Tulalip project as times moves on.
