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 !!