A new day, a new Socl!

Socl now offers a set of simple, fun “create experiences” that make it even easier to express and share ideas with people worldwide – from rich visual collages to short animated media and memes, there’s even more ways to create, collect and share stuff you love – on Socl, and other social networks.

Create Experiences

Picotale

Part “meme-generator,” part game, Picotales are little stories made by overlaying text on an image.

BLINK

Currently available for Windows devices, BLINK apps provide ways to capture, create and share short dynamic media using Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8.

Collage - now with upload!

Collage, Socl’s “go to” create experience now includes image upload…collages are comprised of images, links and videos found on the web or uploaded to Socl.

Video Party

Video Parties are shared video experiences on Socl - great for crafting a quick playlist to share with friends.

In addition to the create experiences, we’ve greatly enhanced Socl for mobile devices, with a responsive design that optimizes for your device. Now you can take Socl anywhere.

Visit the Socl About page to learn more…

We look forward to seeing what you create today!

Happy making!

We are really excited to have a group of five talented graduate students working with us this summer. We explicitly looked to bring people across different disciplines and backgrounds together, from sociology, to digital fabrication, to computer science. 

This summer, Emma, Nate, Erin, Yuheng, and Ilwon will be working on projects that relate to the use and design of social technologies to support civic action and community building activities, both online and offline, digital and tangible.

Here’s a bit more about them:

Emma S. Spiro is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She studies online communication and information-related behaviors in the context of emergencies and disaster events. Her work also explores the structure and dynamics of interpersonal and organizational networks in both online and offline environments. Emma will be joining the faculty at the University of Washington Information School this coming fall.

J. Nathan Matias is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. He collaborates on technology and communities which empower people to become more creative, more effective, and more informed. Coming from a background of tech and charity startups, he currently researches cooperation across diversity at the MIT Center for Civic Media. He also co-facilitates @1book140, The Atlantic’s Twitter book club. (blog) (portfolio)

Erin Smith is a current student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, focusing on digital fabrication and physical computing. She comes from a background in construction and design for film and television and has a particular interest in sustainable, playful, design. She studied at the Yestermorrow sustainable Design/Build school and has promoted ecological awareness through Isabella Rossellini’s series “Green Porno”, and Al Gore’s “Climate Reality Project.”

Yuheng Hu is a PhD student at Arizona State University. His area of research is computational social science. More specifically, he has developed algorithms and systems to mine, analyze and make sense of large-scale, time-varying, heterogeneous social behavior as manifested via user-generated contents on the web. His current research focuses on how online social activity can be harnessed to support civic engagement. His work has appeared in scientific venues including CHI, ICWSM, AAAI, IJCAI, ICDE, and TKDE..

Ilwon Yoon is a student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, focusing on designing social platform and mobile app and game development. He comes from a background in fine art, concentrating on storytelling with diverse mediums and the theme of his work explores how online technologies impact on the behavior of people in real life. He is currently working on designing health-related online game that interacts with self-quantified data.

Do you ever get the urge to travel around the world? With Socl you can discover new and exotic destinations by creating collages about the places you would like to visit. Let your mind wander and dream big. For instance, one of our community members Barney Pear recently did a collage about Venice, Italy

As you can see, the images she chose for her collage are vibrant, colorful and have a great deal of texture. It’s almost as if we are welcomed into her dream of Venice living. I was so inspired that I riffed back with a collage featuring Sicily, Italy.

Having visited family in Sicily a few years ago, I was excited to share the images that I remember from my time there.

It’s the new ideas you gain from the people on Socl that makes the experience so valuable. You never know, you might even meet someone on Socl from the location you would like to visit and they can give you a local’s insight into your next dream vacation.

The best part of making your dreams a reality is that the Socl community will be there to help you along the way. Stay inspired and dream big. We can’t wait to see you on Socl!

One of the best features on Socl is riffing. Sometimes when new users come on the site and see a riff, they think it is like a Retweet on Twitter. But it is totally different. Look at it as expanding from an idea. It could be something similar, related or totally different. 

Here is one example from a riff between three users on Socl including myself. 

Fizaah Faiyaz did a post on “balconies”. It is a very colorful post with beautiful balconies looking from the outside. 

I then did a riff on “balcony view” which showed the perspective looking out from the balcony and, since I love the beach, I chose images with water views.

Then Kurvoazie Shir riffed on my post with “balconies without balconies.”

This is part of the fun in Socl. It allows your creativity on one topic expand to your heart’s content. I finished the riff with Popes in the balcony.

The examples above were all riffs about balconies. But my last riff about the Pope could have led to a whole different topic. Now that you have the link, go ahead and take it creatively where you want to. I will get a notification of the riff, so I dare you and let’s see where it can take us to. Rome and Michelangelo’s masterpieces in the Vatican… maybe? 

We’re pleased to announce that you can become the moderator of your favorite collections and collect with your friends - Socl collections are sure to be even better than ever!

Collection Moderators

Now, every collection has at least one moderator who comes from the Socl community. Moderators have the ability to edit the title, description and tags of a collection. Moderators may also remove inappropriate or off topic posts from a collection at their discretion.

You can become a collection moderator in a variety of ways. If you create a “Me” Collection, you are the moderator. You can also invite moderators to join you in contributing to the collection (those invited will receive a notification that they’ve been invited to moderate which they can choose to accept or decline), essentially creating an “Us” Collection.

In the case of “Everyone” Collections, the original creator is designated moderator, but from that point on moderator designation is based on active participation in the collection. Active participants in a collection can eventually replace original moderators based on participation in and contribution to the quality of that collection.

“Us” Collections

With the addition of Collection Moderators, we are now offering a third type of Collection – “Us” Collections. Now you can invite others to moderate a collection with you; you can also decide if you would like that collection to be visible to everyone or only your co-contributors.

As always, please let us know what you think and happy making!

Today we made it even easier to share the Socl love… Now you can easily share any Socl post to more of your favorite social networks, such as Pinterest and Tumblr.

Simply click “share” at the base of a post you’d like to share… Below and left is a lovely post made by our own Cheri Walters. I used the new share feature to include this post in my Tumblr blog (top right) and on my “Love Love Love” Pinterest Board (bottom left).

Happy Making!

For those of you that don’t know, FUSE Labs is also the home of Kodu Game Lab.  Kodu is a complete 3D game development environment designed to let kids create their own 3D games.  Kodu is built around a custom visual programming language that makes it easy for everyone to learn how to program.

The new version of Kodu includes lots of new features, here’s the highlights:

• Touch is now supported as an input method.  You can also build games that use touch to control your characters.
• We have a bunch of new characters all focused on making water games.  Heading the list is Octo.  Like a real octopus he can squirt ink and camouflage himself.
• Programmable control for some of the world settings:  you can now change the sky color and lighting effects via programming.  The transitions can either be instant or you can have them happen over time.  Whatever works best for your game.
• Programmable control of some character settings:  you can change a character’s size or max speed on the fly now.  Like the world settings you can control how quickly this change happens.

The focus on water characters isn’t by accident.  We’re also announcing the Imagine Cup Kodu Challenge where the theme is exploring the relationships between water and people.  This is a chance for game developers ages 9 to 18 to compete in a world wide competition.  Oh, and the winners get some cash, too.

You can get the latest version of Kodu here: http://www.KoduGameLab.com

Find out all the details about the contest here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Mar13/03-19KoduChallengePR.aspx

It’s almost Spring here in the Pacific Northwest. To celebrate, FUSE Labs is rolling out a fresh Socl design featuring many new capabilities we think you’re going to love.

Here’s a summary of what’s inside the “Spring 2013 Collection”:

 - Simplified site navigation, including:

• create a post button
• discover (full site search and discovery)
• pinned menu for quick access to notifications, messages, setting, parties and about
• centered Socl logo to refresh the page
• single click access to your profile
• feed pivots between following and everyone

 - Collections and Interests merged into one concept

• collections curated by everyone (formerly Interests)
• collections curated by individuals, including private collections
• collection descriptions
• tags now done at the collection level rather than the post level and applied only by collection followers

- Better post creation, featuring:

• drag and drop
• resize
• shuffle
• share to other social networks

- Personal opportunity cards to help build your following feed

- Private messages

- In line editing of profile information

- Enhanced discovery, search and presentation of related content

- Enhanced first time user experience

Many of the ideas in the new design have come directly from you. Thank you so much for your continued support.

We sincerely hope you enjoy the new Socl. Happy making!

For the Socl faithful, we thought we’d create a brief Q and A regarding the Spring 2013 release.

What happened to Interests?

Socl Interests have been merged into Collections. Collections can now be curated by an group (formerly Interest) or an individual.

I can’t find a Collection for one of the Interests I followed - what happened?

It is possible that the Interest did not meet the activity level required to be merged into a Collection or was not in keeping with the Socl terms of service. If you feel an Interest is missing in error, please let us know via Socl Public Feedback and we’ll look into it.

How do I tag posts now?

Tagging of posts is now done at the collection level. All the posts in a collection now carry the same consistent tags, aiding our ability to surface related content in the other parts of Socl and reducing the chance of tag misuse.

What are some of the other new features in the Spring 2013 release of Socl?

For a summary of the Spring 2013 release, see our blog post announcing the update.