Microsoft will announce the private beta launch of Popfly this morning, a new Silverlight application that allows users to create mashups, widgets and other applications using a very cool and easy to use web-based graphical interface. We previously covered the launch of Yahoo Pipes and compared five different applications that let you mix data and build applications online. At the time we mentioned how this space was really heating up – and how Pipes from Yahoo simplified the creation of mashups and mini-applications by providing a drag+drop interface. Microsoft are the latest entrants in this market, and they have completely leapfrogged every other application we have seen so far.
Popfly is a big leap forward from the competitors above because it lets you do so much more, and it is one of the nicest web application interfaces I have ever seen. With Popfly, you can create applications, mashups, web pages and widgets (gadgets) and it is all tied together in a social network (as part of the Live Spaces platform) where you can connect with other users and publishers of applications. Mashups are created by dragging in and connecting ‘blocks’ which produce an output. Blocks are modules that connect to various web services API’s, and even today there are dozens of different blocks that work with a whole variety of different web services.
See additional screen shots and a link to a screencast on the Popfly overview page here.
Seeing applications like Popfly coming out of Microsoft is something that I couldn’t have imagined all too long ago – and together with the recent Silverlight announcements (which we were also very excited about) the new Microsoft is really starting to come out through their product releases. Popfly so far seems to be another potential big hit from the new Microsoft under Ray Ozzie (Ozziesoft).
Invites: While the private beta is very limited (even within Microsoft), we do have TEN invitations to send out. Leave a comment about how you would use Popfly and the best (or funniest) ten will be sent an invitation to the application.
Hi,
I’ll go first:
How about a Truemors that doesn’t suck?
(if that’s possible — which I think, it might be)
Cheers
tony @ dji
Please send an invite! I will be creating the next Digg-Google Maps-Flickr-Youtube-Twitter-MySpace mashup that will rock the world! But no one will ever use…
would like an invite please !
Looks good – particularly for Microsoft – hopefully it has less flaws than windows vista
I would try to combine it with German and European apps…
Oh, you want a idea…
porn + silverlight = even larger porn market
- INvite please – I dont have any ideas;
Nik – who defines “best” or “funniest”? Us or Microsoft? Could make a difference
A mashup showing hamburger, burrito and roadfood reviews and recent home sales near the best burger joints.
I would love an invite. I’d use it to create a widget that has floating ducks that look like the ones on the Popfly page (http://www.popfly.ms/)... but the starting shot would have all of them be the same colour. Can’t make 1 feel left out like the pink one there…
Invite me, I’ll use it to build apps that bring the Blue Screen of Death online
Dear Nik if you’ll provide me with an invite I’ll ask Santa bring you something really cool next XMas
well. how about maps+real estate prices+events+weather+gdp+etc. mashup, providing calculation of life quality index for any u.s. place. formula is patented.
Flitterlight = Flickr + Twitter + Silverlight = please send invite!
I would love an invite. I plan on ruling the world with it. Not so much with Popfly, but with the actual invite.
Thanks.
I will use it to connect every system I can find together. They must do something cool if all connected right? google earth + chatbots + fickr + second life + hot or not = some fun! Then add in archive.org and wikipedia for the smartest app ever. Wierd Science come to life!
Invite me! I’d like to create a mashup + social support network to help support people who are constipated. It’ll be called Poopfly or possibly shitter.
Personally I’d use it to create a translation tool for comments on Flickr or other services by combining a translator with feeds from those services. That would be useful!
I would like an invite to further enhance the social network of hamster owners I am creating. The interface will look like a giant hamster cage with dancing hamsters everywhere….pure awesomeness.
BTW – to join A.H.O.o.t.W (Adult Hamster Owners of the World) please email me at: adulthamsterownersoftheworld[@]gmail[dot]com. Membership is $7.98 a month.
i’d like an invite to poopyfly please
Would love to get an invite please.
Its looks cool.
I’d love to have an invite too.
Campaign season is upon us. I’ll build a mashup that takes info from candidates (speeches, events, appearances, etc), maps, videos and photos and mashes them together. A new perspective of the campaign trail.
Maybe we’ll partner with shittr to provide a new and exciting way for candidates to fling virtual crap at each other.
Please invite me. I want to see what process it runs as when I have to kill it in task manager.
I’ll windows Live! mashup Twitter + Truemors = Tumors, the next killer-app, ultimate super duper disruptive vroom vroom Kawasaki technology!
With the invite I plan to put the internet into an infinite loop with a particulary devious recursive mash-up.
Spiffing
I’d use popfly to create a widget that uses popfly to randomly connect together from 2 to 4 web APIs, and then evaluates the output for interestingness, publishing the most successful ones on its own blog. After 3 weeks promoting each new one, it would lose interest and stop maintaining the back-end in order to better devote AI time to the next one.
invite please!
I will use this to create a — how you say? mashup? — of the Popfly logo with Flickr, thus enabling me to create an unlimited amount of Popfly desktop wallpapers: http://www.popf...ew/Desktop.aspx
I will also use it, in general, to DEMOCRATIZE DEVELOPMENT.
I would make a mashup of the plethora of information available for fantansy sports players. As a group they aren’t the most computer savy. They do offer the chance to speak to the coveted demographic (males 18-35). Sorry nothing funny here or particulary thought out, but this group of computer users could use some help.
I’d use it to do an internal company employee membership service for a twitter like internal email/stock price chart correlation widget in real time.
I’d use popfly to automatically generate patents on obvious and logical software improvements, then pin these one by one to a world map of open source project leaders so my legal team could threaten lawsuits in the hope of squeezing out licensing revenue.
in fact, wait, I’m doing it now, so I don’t need an invite.
I want to use it to provide a method to communicate with family far away. Don’t want to pull the sympathy vote but the mashup would be all about our sick child.
Who farted?
It stinks in here…must be all the begging.
riiiiipppppp….can I have an invite?
I would love an invite.
@ Sean South – Infinite loop! Brilliant!
I would use it to test the potential for scientific mashups/ bioinformatics but that’s probably to geeky
If it’s better than Y!Pipes, I want in. I use pipes for a news mashup and to pull tags from the articles. Love to check out a new player.
I’ll use it to automatically get beta test invitations…
Hard to tell what it can be used for without getting access to it.
But four ideas: strip the non-English-language posts out of del.icio.us/popular so I can more easily skip stuff I can’t read
Aggregate several similar RSS feeds (eg tech news) down to a single feed by bundling similar stories together (all the stories mentioning AppleGate go in one post)
The last two riff off Joshua: archive.org history of a URL as an RSS feed.
Last.fm “Recently Played Tracks” feed with links to the artist’s Wikipedia page inserted – Wikipedia generally has a better summary of an artist than Last.fm
If popfly allows you to embed your own silverlight code (publish your own blocks?), all of these are probably possible.
I would use this to create an infinite loop with Yahoo Pipes to bring down the whole Web!
Popfly – Mr Jiggy Fly’s dad? Sorry – reference to an old Geico commercial…
A good (if not the best) reason to send ME an invite: It is meant to be, as in destiny. This invite has to be given to me in order to save the world. This is all you know and all you need to know right now. When the time is right, answers will follow. Good luck.
Would love an invite.
I have an idea and it seems popfly is the technology to implement it with. It’s dating but with a twist. So, it s Flickr + maps + “a few secret ingredients”
I’ld like to build adapt the idea of twittervision to web-radio – display a worldmap with current song-titles of radio-stations all over the world popping up…data-sources would include metadata of icecast/shoutcast stations or scraped data from tracklists available on the web.
hard to tell what’s possible and how far integration with silverlight goes…
I would love to have an invite… and try to mash SharePoint 2007 and Silverlight features for what? I dont know… how about a realtime stream of blog posts that are related to SharePoint 2007
I’ll be using the app to mash up and edit my new ‘Hi, I’m Silverlight. Hi, I’m Apollo.’ commercials.
number 16 up there should get all the invites.
Michael,
Appolo or silverlight. I see some new chad hurleys looking for this appolication to be releases.
If I got 2, I’d auction one off ebay and create a widget with the other to track the bids by location, price graph, profile pic, and user rating & comments. The person with a combination of best ratings and price would win.
How’s that for community?
I sure could use an invite. I’m as interested in new technology and the companies featured on TechCrunch as anyone. I have notepads upon notepads of ideas I’d love to pursue.
And outside of a little HTML, I can’t code a lick. I’ve been trying to learn/understand Y! Pipes and Dapper, but I still need an app that let’s me build things with the ability of a 3rd grade monkey.
If Popfly fits the description – drag/drop, simple use, simple production of cool stuff – I would love a chance to try it out on behalf of those like me.
My second attempt at an invite: No humor version.
I would use popfly to create a uber-portal that would connect all of the blogs, feeds, fan sites and other information resources related to College Football. It would be the ultimate destination for a sport that has a unwavering and fanatical fan base.
GoogleScholar+ PatentSearch + LiveMaps = The diffusion of ideas and knowledge, geographically, across the globe.