This morning Microsoft announced that Popfly, their visual mash-up creator, is out of closed Beta. In Popfly you can quickly tie services together with a flashy block metaphor. They make blocks available from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and a number of other web sites. Popfly also provides a number of effects that can be used on this data that would let you make a flip book from your photos or plot data on a map. You are able to embed Popfly widgets in Facebook, Spaces, Vista’s Sidebar or another site.
Popfly is built on Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross-platform Flash-competitor (Radar post). To use Silverlight you need to download a 4MB file — a barrier to use by partners or on Live.com. I expect Microsoft to keep building apps that let people make these widgets and spread the need for users to download it. This strategy will gain incremental growth, but Silverlight won’t hit the mainstream until it’s actually a part of Internet Explorer or Vista.
There’s an embedded widget after the jump.
Technorati Tags: web2summit, radarnetworks, popfly, web2.0, web20, silverlight, microsoft
The above Popfly app is part of a Web 2.0 Summit sponsorship and is running on our hallway kiosks. It was the most complex application I could find in the Popfly gallery combining feedback from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Technorati.