Microsoft working on social network called Tulalip

Everything we know: it's named after a group of Native Americans in Washington and you can share

Oh, God. Please. No.

Not another social network.

There’s about to be another new (and, unsurprisingly, very late) entrant to the social networking party: Microsoft.

Above is a screenshot from socl.com as it was on Thursday, when a blogger over at Fusibile.com discovered it. And here’s everything we know about it:

“With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever.”

Curiously, the screenshot reveals that users will be able to sign in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts, which seems to suggest that Tulalip isn’t intended to be its own standalone network à la the recently launched Google+.

Still, one can’t help but think that Microsoft’s work on Tulalip (and yesterday’s leak) are directly inspired by the seemingly inextinguishable hype over Google’s new social network. Yesterday, Google CEO Larry Page announced that the network already has 10 million members and they’re sharing over one billion items daily (though that number is a bit inflated).

Facebook obviously is paying attention to all these new developments with a watchful eye. Just a week after Google+ launched, Facebook hosted a press event to release new chat features, including group text chat and one-to-one video chat. The latter could be seen as an effort to keep up with Google’s Hangouts, whereby up to 10 users can video conference at once.

In case you’re wondering, Microsoft took the name “Tulalip” from a group of Native Americans residing in western Washington, a little over an hour’s drive from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond.

If you point your browser to socl.com now, however, you’lll only see the following message: “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.”

We’ll be the judge of that...