Tulalip: Microsoft also looking at a social layer?

Information has been leaked from Microsoft to the internet suggesting that a social search service may be under development.

What if Microsoft was now preparing their own social network layer? With Google+ being a hot topic, Microsoft may have "accidentally" leaked information about a service named Tulalip on the web site www.socl.com  (a domain name registered to Microsoft ).

The information was noticed last week by Fusible, although it is all rather mysterious. Tulalip seems to oscillate between a social network and a search service. The information has come from the publication of a Welcome screen where it was possible to read that "with Tulalip you can find what every want and share this with others easier than ever before".

A search field, strangely labelled Open, was present while you could also see at the top of the page that there were Facebook and Twitter buttons which allow you to easily connect to these services. And… that was about all.

Now when you go to socl.com, you will see that there is a message stating that an internal Microsoft Research project was published to the internet "by mistake". This certainly is a strange error. Microsoft Research undertakes a lot of projects, and not all of them are deployed.
 
This certainly doesn’t help resolve the mystery, but Tulalip is the name of a tribe of American Indians to the west of the State of Washington.