Why Popfly?

Have you seen Popfly yet?  It's a cool tool for designing and creating mashup and webpages, and it's built with Silverlight technology, which means that you can write and display your mashup on almost any browser and platform!  It's still in alpha (and I have five invites if anyone is interested...), but there is a lot you can do with it so far, and it's a lot of fun to play with.

This is the Projects page, which lists the projects that I have created so far.  Popfly lets you design a number of projects which incorporate different blocks, and then you can use them, combine them, edit them, basically do whatever you want with them.

 

Then we have the mashup creator interface.  Popfly has this concept of "Blocks" which anyone can write.  They are pieces of javascript which interface with some other web service to provide information.  So there are blocks for things like Virtual Earth, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and a ton more.  In the picture below, I'm using the Facebook Popfly block along with the PhotoSphere Popfly block to create a spinning collection of my friends' pictures from Facebook.  With a lot of the applications like Facebook and Flickr, they give you an application key to use to interface with the web services.  So I added keys for Flickr, Facebook and Upcoming so I could use my memberships on those sites to grab information.

 

And here's my final app!  The pictures here are my friends' id photos from Facebook, and as I move my mouse, they spin around in response to it, getting faster or slowing down and changing direction as well. 

There's a lot more to showcase with Popfly regarding the blocks and how you can create your own block, so I will leave that to another post.

If you're interested in a Popfly Alpha membership, e-mail me.  First come, first serve!

Cross posted from Martha's Blog