Popfly Logo

This morning Microsoft announced the next iteration of the Popfly application. Popfly is an end user tool to create mashups is a visual fashion, there is no programming required to create the mashup (although “advanced” mashups will allow you to to inject some of your own code into the process). Once you have created a mashup using the drag and drop building block features, you can create a web page to host the mashup in, or it has a variety of other options to host the mashup in (including putting it in Facebook).

Popfly was originally announced back in May and at the time it was a closed Alpha that you had to be invited to attend. I ran out of invites in August when I gave a quick demonstration of Popfly at the Madison .NET User Group and had a line of people waiting for me at the end of the stage. One of the best things about the move to Beta is that the invite only restriction has been removed.

I have built a couple of Mashups in Popfly and one I can tell you it is very easy because they have pre-built interfaces into some of the most popular Social networks on the Internet (Like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter). At the Facebook Developer Garage I created some Mashups that pulled photos that were tagged with my name and put them into a spinning globe viewer (yes it looked tacky, but it took 10 minutes and required no code). At the Silicon Prairie Social we built mashups based on Flickr photos that had a Chicago Theme and we altered back and forth about putting them on a map or a “page turner” type application.

Check out Popfly when you get a chance!