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What is Popfly?

Posted By: Joshua Allen | May 18th, 2007 @ 4:10 PM
The big news today is about Popfly, our new mashup-creation tool.  Nik at TechCrunch thinks it's cool, and says "Seeing applications like Popfly coming out of Microsoft is something that I couldn’t have imagined all too long ago".  It is pretty awesome, check out the interview Rory did with the Popfly team, and also watch the demos.

I saw the first builds of Popfly a month or so before MIX07, and we really wanted to show it at the event.  Popfly is the canonical example of what we were showing at MIX: built in Silverlight and runs in the browser, and enables people to "mix" together inclusive web experiences from all of the big web sites.  However, the Visual Studio team isn't known for rushing things out prematurely, and we were sworn to secrecy.

I've seen some initial commentary about Popfly that compares it to Yahoo! Pipes.  This is probably because the UI does have some boxes that you can connect with lines to do some programming "visually".  But if you take the time to watch all the demos, you'll see that Popfly is really taking a different focus.  Popfly focuses more on producing the user interface, while Pipes is focused on the data.  I would not be surprised to see people using Popfly to consume data from Pipes in the near future.
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