According to the website, the image was discovered at the -owned domain. The site, Fusible reported, was not operational when it was found this week.

As of Friday morning, the page had been removed from the site and replaced with this 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."

This development comes on the heels of Microsoft competitor 's , Google+, two weeks ago.

Late Thursday, Google CEO Larry Page announced that the company's fledgling site, which is still in field trials, already has gained more than 10 million users. A direct challenger of Facebook, Google+ is stirring up the social networking world with its quickly found momentum.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, said, "It looks like Microsoft is worried that Google is going to suck all the remaining oxygen out of the social networking room."