Microsoft has accidentally revealed an experimental social search project called "Tulalip" on a newly-purchased domain.
It seems Microsoft may have “accidentally” leaked its own beta version, Tulalip, but some industry analysts observe the move as deliberate.
The brief posting of Tulalip on Thursday was found by a blogger identified only as J.B., who wrote about it on the website domain news site Fusible.com.
"The four letter domain socl.com would complement bing.com," the Fusible post said. "Although the site isn't operational, visitors can get an idea of where Microsoft is going with the service called 'Tulalip', which also happens to be the name of a group of Native American tribes located not far from Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft is headquartered."
But shortly after the preview appeared, developers pulled the application down. An apology was issued by Microsoft, which says, “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.”
J.B. snapped a screenshot of what could be found at Socl.com before Microsoft took it down -- a green rectangle with the word "Welcome" above a short description that read "With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever."
Sign-in options for the site appeared to be offered for both Facebook and Twitter users -- no Google+ option there -- but when links were clicked, they didn't work, the blog post said.
As a Microsoft representative reiterated to Search Engine Land, Socl.com is an internal design project from one of Microsoft’s research teams which was mistakenly published to the web.
Pointing to the extreme success of Facebook and Twitter, some analysts points out that Microsoft is again “late to the party,” even if it’s able to offer something different.
Google is now saying that Google+ has in excess of 10 million members and climbing, though the network is still in beta testing phase.
Poor MS again late to the party :P
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