Microsoft Popfly
As you've probably read in dozens of other places, Microsoft released Popfly into beta today. It's been around in alpha form for awhile so there are already dozens of pre-built blocks and mashups to play with.
Microsoft says Popfly is:
"the fun and easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, and Web pages. It’s made up of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups and a social network where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users." Actually it took me a few seconds to think of why that sentence sounded hokey. Then Bedazzler popped in my head. Sure enough, MyBedazzler.com (I highly recommend you check out that site. Every time I hear the word "Bedazzler" it makes me laugh)
When a product is pitched as "Fun & Easy" you can't have high expectations.
So how does it work?
Popfly works on the concept of blocks that you can link together visually to create a mashup. So the content from one block can be used as input to another block. Kind of like laying out a flow chart. You can adjust the properties on the blocks to change how the mashup works. For example you can customize the Upcoming block to filter on event keywords. Behind the scenes the blocks call their respective web services like Digg, Flickr etc to return data to be displayed or passed as input to another block. One nice feature is that you can click the lightbulb icon on a block and it'll give you mashup ideas by displaying the blocks that it will work with well.
Some of the current blocks include RSS, Twitter, Upcoming, Virtual Earth, Yahoo Traffic, SoapBox, Facebook, Technorati, Xbox Live and various display options like the famous Page Turn sample or slideshows.
It's still relatively new so don't expect to find a ton of great Popfly apps yet. There are currently a handful that were created in the Alpha period listed as the most popular, but each has 1 review. On the plus side, it'll be easier to create a cool mashup and have the most popular app on there.
If you are really interested in Popfly, there is a "Mashup and Win" contest starting now. The best Popfly mashup submitted by October 31st has a chance to win a Zune 2.0 or an Xbox 360 Halo 3 Super Special Ultimate Elite Limited Edition.
From a technical perspective, it's probably the best Silverlight application out there besides Top Banana. It's probably even one of the better RIA applications out there in that it runs as if it were an actual desktop application. The UI is very responsive even with the gratuitous spinning animations when you mouse over anything. Although, the UI earns a lackluster "meh". It's ok, but not an achievement UI aesthetics. Something like Top Banana is more impressive UI in my opinion.
In terms of using it, I think I'd have to try it out longer. I'm more accustomed to writing actual code rather than linking to boxes together. I really have no idea what the boxes are doing when I connect them together. At this point I could probably write the same mashup in Visual Studio a lot faster than I could in build it in Popfly. I felt like a 2 yr old playing with legos - just mashing blocks together. I could also do without the huge zoom in animation when I change a property. Sure it looks cool, but it's not really optimized for productivity.
There is also an "Advanced Mode" if you want to edit actual code. I'm a little spoiled by Visual Studio and Intellisense where I can mouse over a method and it tells me what it does. The advanced mode is just a text editor. For example there is a line of code "checkForCallingDepth1();" What does that do? Is there a "checkForCallingDepth2()"? It doesn't return anything so do I need it?
One other issue. For a tool that seems primarily non-developer focused, the interface isn't very non-developer friendly. Look at the difference between Popfly and Yahoo Pipes.
Popfly Flickr block and filtering
Yahoo Pipes Flickr block and filtering
The Yahoo Pipes blocks seem more intuitive because of it's natural language. Why give me the name "getPhotos"? Plus the Yahoo interface is one simple line to find 20 pictures of cats. The Popfly interface takes about 1/2 the screen for the same function (well once it completes its swooping zoom animation). The filtering is another great example. How are the conditions supposed to work in Popfly? Do I need "x = 3" or "x == 3"? Why is it "x"? Where is that variable defined? What about doing something like "contains" that the Yahoo filter makes easy? As a developer, I wouldn't expect a tool like Popfly to be more confusing than writing actual code.
My biggest issue is that I'm not so clear on the target audience. I would be mildly surprised if anyone with development experience used this to build a quality mashup in lieu of writing their own code. It also appears too confusing for non-developers. I don't know if it would be harder to explain to my mom what a mashup is or for her to actually build a mashup in Popfly. Plus there are so many mashups out there. How many more twitter / flickr / rss / map mashups do we need? The potential for an innovative mashup seems slim. And if you could make an innovative mashup, it would probably be something that doesn't already have a block in Popfly that you could use.
Utlimately, I'm not super excited about Popfly long term. Microsoft has the marketing ability to make something like this maintain a buzz for awhile, but I really can't imagine people using this 1 year from now. Although it's still a beta so it may improve greatly in the final version and as more people build better blocks. (Well perpetual beta is a hallmark of web 2.0 apps so maybe it will never move out of beta).
Regardless, I think the developers did an awesome job building the Popfly infrastructure and it's a pretty impressive technical achievement considering Silverlight is still an alpha product. In my opinion it's a great platform for showcasing Silverlight, but a poor platform for actually building mashups.