Microsoft Popfly – The golden thread linking Web 2.0 together

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Microsoft’s new web development tool “Popfly” will be an interesting technology to play with. Popfly is designed to allow non-professional programmers and hobbyists to build mash-ups, gadgets, Web sites and applications using pre-built “blocks.” As of now, there are 40 of these Web-programming blocks from which they can choose, including Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, Virtual Earth and news service blocks. (More are coming from Microsoft and third parties) Popfly users can tie together these data-source, transformation and display blocks to create their own customized mash-ups.

Sounds familiar? Well Yahoo developed their Mashup aggregrator earlier this year with Yahoo Pipes. A great concept, though its still a little too techie to use.
Popfly looks (See video below) easier to use and easier to setup.

What does this mean for you, me and and SME? Well, I have been looking for sometime for a “framework” or tool that an can be used to link different Web 2.0 technologies. (Mashups are producing truly innovative uses of mixing and matching next gen web stuff). However, I’ve not found anything that connect “the dots together”.

I’m a hoping a tool like Popfly will make it easier, to build “golden threads” connecting all the different mashups together, in an easy to use, intuitive framework.

Ray Ozzie’s influence at Microsoft is truly inspiring innovation. Well, Microsoft never really stopped innovating, but they didn’t communicate about what they were doing effectively!
The recent news and beta release of Microsoft Silverlight plugin technology (Microsoft’s Adobe Flash alternative) means the company is taking web technology serious again.

Microsoft has started sending out a few Popfly alpha invitations and plans to allow the initial group of testers to distribute more invitations virally. When released, (no final release schedule as yet) Popfly will available for free.

Anyone with a spare invite? I’d be happy and grateful to test!

I’m on the Alpha!! Thanks to Steve Clayton and Microsoft

Cheers

Jas

Microsoft Popfly Overview
Watch the Popfly ScreenCast