Yes sounds similar to our ds, now 12.
At 8 he was so bored and friendless at school he ended up becoming depressed.
Social skills training did help since 1. it showed him other kids like him so he didn't feel 100% different. and 2. he did begin to understand stuff like how to respond to people to keep a conversation going; things that seem simple to me, but apparently never occurred to him.
A bit of additional counseling was done to help him not get so stressed about school stuff, and he joined scouts to have a regular practice zone for conversing with kids. There are a fair number of kids in scouts who are advanced in general, so it is a good fit for him. In about a year he was feeling better and has been going uphill in terms of number of friends and overall feeling pretty good.
We did finally pull him from school for homeschool because his one gifted class was setting up to become a real disappointment if not actual disaster in 6th grade.
Best of luck, I think a smattering of different approaches to cover several bases seemed to help our ds...
