Micorsoft in Mashup : Popfly

On Friday 18th May 2007 Microsoft announced their new Online Mashup Tool Popfly and as expected Community has started blogging about it without any delay. People are saying that it is a copy of Yahoo pipe and Google. Few people feel that even logo is similar with Linux logo.

While writing my last blog "Mashup: An Overview" I got chance to do some hands-on on yahoo pipe and few other Mashup creator application. So I thought to try with this also.

Ooppsss.....I have to wait…….Microsoft announced this alpha version, which is not for everyone. I registered it and I got a unusual email from them saying

"We have received your request for an invitation to Popfly. We will e-mail your invitation when we send out our next batch of invites. L

Mail from suf@microsoft.com

I am not able to understand technical difficulties in granting access and why Microsoft wants to do this in batches. So I could not do any hands-on, but they have published nice screen-cast. So I want to put my thoughts on PopFly based on that screen-cast.

I am happy about :-)

• PopFly has very rich user experience, look and fell seems awesome. (I am using words seems because I have not used it, it is just based on screen-cast) . Microsoft is leader in creating UI and new Office 2007 is proof of that.
• It does not require any programming language (Nothing new these days) but if required Microsoft visual studio editor can be used to do add code for creating advance features. (This is more exciting for me). So naive user can use on-line tool while advance user can enrich features with IDE. (Yahoo and Google are behind with this approach in their application).
• It also provides online space community, with all the “Web2.0 features” so Mashup can be shared, can be commented and rated etc.
• It has online web-page creator application like Google pages, but it seems richer then Google, User has more options to create interactive web-sites.
• It is free, Microsoft and free, these two words do not fit together :-)
  

I am sad about :-(

• User has to wait till access is granted, No way to do any hands-on.
• Storage space is limit to 25MB.

I can’t say anything ? ? ?

It support exes files also into Mashup with java script, html, mp3 and others. Will I be able to use exe within online Mashup application, strange but I am not sure how????...

Lets wait till Microsoft grant the access to me to use PopFly !!

Mashup An Overview

From the word it can be inferred that, It is about of mixing, either mixing of music to create new one or mixing of tomato with ginger to make Indian curry, both create something new which is more important then individuals. But I am not here to write about music or curry, because neither I am musician nor very good cook (I don't know about music but I am sure I will be good cook in few months :-)). I am here to write about Software Mashup.

It is also about mixing, mixing different type of information from different sources such a way that they become more appropriate in user context. There is no formal definition available of Mashup but from my point of view the key for Mashup is a)information must be coming from outside of host application b) application should more useful then individual data sources.

Internet is growing with rocket speed, it has huge huge amount of data in the form of news, blogs, wiki, public web-pages, and more then that are locked into private databases behind web applications. Consummation of this kind of data effectively is also a big concern and solution of this can be Mashup.

Take an example weather.com has information about weather forecast of almost all city around the world, great very useful information, and Google is master in creating maps...so when we merge these two information to create Mashup we have one trip planner kind of application, which can give me the information about distance between arrival and departure place, and weather conditions in between the route. So this Mashup application (weatherbonk) is more useful for me when I am planning my trip from Zurich to Paris then google maps or weather.com .


Now, Lets go behind the scene. There are basically three entity involved in mahup application

• Service provider - google, yahoo, ebay, amazon, flickr, youtube , trulia, ........


• Mashup provider - virtual place,wii seeker, diggDot, weatherbonk......


• User - you and me :-)

Service provider publish their service in form of API, Feeds (RSS/ATOM), Web Services or by any other open standard like REST. Mashup publisher can be anyone who combines these services to achieve some goal, and publish them over Internet, and finally end-user enjoys these Mashups.

Business model is fairly simple, service provider become more famous, their reach to end user increases and henceforth their business. Mashup provider mostly earn by putting advertisement on their site and most profitable is end-user, as he gets effective applications free of cost which saves lots of time (My father always says that "Time is money" :-) )

Putting all these in diagram,


Mashup is already in mainstream, Programmableweb has listed 426 API , 1869 mashups which is increasing by 3 per day. You can find lots of interesting mashup here, although most of them are evolved around yahoo map, google map, flickr or youtube, because these services are leader and has published API in very early stage but new API are also coming from other community like real state (Trulia), shipping (UPS, FedEx).

There are lots of user-friendly Mashup builder tools are also available like Yahoo-Pipes, webjam which create Mashup just out-of-box. No need of any programming knowledge, with just little creativity anyone can develop new Mashup. Yahoo Pipes are one of these kinds of application where user can easily integrate feeds, can search from yahoo, google base, flickr and can performe other related operations. Most exciting things is that there is no need to start from scratch, you can clone pipe shared by other people and enhance the features.

Please have a look to my yahoo pipes (Latest movies video), which just shows all the videos from youtube related to latest bollywood movies in, It combines feeds from "sulekha" and then search videos from "YouTube" and sort it by publication days.

In future, availability of new API and easy to use Mashup builder will create environment where user will hardly access contents directly, rather he will create or customize Mashup once and use it forever.

Note: Mashup comes with security and copyright problems, so before creating any Mashup be aware that you are using information from trusted source and not using other's licenses or key.

!! Create and share new mashups with me also!!

-AmitKumar P Agrawal