A lot of people were caught off guard when Microsoft quietly launched it's own social network to compete with Facebook and Google+ yesterday. The new social network let's you sign up using your Facebook account and gives you several ways to find and follow friends as well as interests.

One particularly interesting feature is the ability to join a video party. Video parties let you watch music videos with other people on the so.cl. You can also follow interests by categories and create new categories of interest.

Something else interesting is the search feature. When you search the web your search results are displayed in the public feed. You can disable this feature by clicking on a small lock icon to the right of the search box. When doing a search you can choose what you think is the most relevant results and that will be the result displayed in the feed.

Instead of liking a post on the social network you "riff" a post. Along with "riffing" you have all the other features you've come to expect like updating your status, commenting, tagging, and sharing.

Overall the new social network is clean and seems to have some interesting opportunities for promoting and generating traffic to your website. If you don't already have a website don't forget to create a website at WebStarts.com.