Today Microsoft launched it’s beta version of Socl, their new social network that’s strikingly similar to Pinterest. I took a trip and signed up for Socl to see what the buzz was about. After logging in I was a little confused as to how it worked so I’m sure a lot of new users will be as well. Basically you create a new “topic” which will create a new post. When you type in a topic, it searches Bing for images and videos to attach to your topic. You can then add the pictures to your post. A lot like Pinterest but not even close to as functional or fun. Pinterest lets you browse a full screen of images while Socl only allows you to browse a narrow set of images. At first I thought you could only search Bing for images on Socl, but then I realized you can past in a link from a website and scrape through their images to add to your “post”. To me Microsofts new social media network is ridiculously similar to Pinterest but confusing and unnecessary. Why do we need a confusing Pinterest clone? It already looks like it’s getting spammy too. I’ll keep my eye out for a good use for this platform to drive traffic, but for now I’m going to set it aside and see what comes of it. Hopefully for Microsoft they don’t have everyone wanting to set it aside.