Popfly as a Web Platform
Primer
Microsoft Popfly (www.popfly.com), currently in beta since October 2007, is a web site and tool to help people create and share web sites, mashups, and other kinds of experiences.
This service, in my opinion, is a really interesting and innovative product Microsoft has delivered this year. From an architect's perspective, Popfly can be considered as a Web platform, along with the many other interesting ones created this year, such as the Facebook Platform.
Many people also saw Popfly's potential as a Web platform. For example, Mary Jo Foley correlated it to Yahoo! Pipes, Tom Foremski described how easy it is to build a Facebook app with Popfly, John Mullinax provided a business perspective on how to leverage Popfly, and Denny Boynton with some architectural thoughts.
A Web Platform
In an earlier blog post I talked about "Web as a Platform" (in Web 2.0's context) and briefly described a layered and componentized perspective in looking at the Web platform in general. Popfly fits in that perspective very well, and can be categorized into a composition tools layer that doesn't seem to have received a lot of attention from the general Web 2.0 community. Specifically, in the programmable Web aspect of Web 2.0, the focus has been on creating the APIs, frameworks, runtime environments, standards, etc. to facilitate the various kinds of applications and social interactions. But the tasks of developing these applications still rely on traditional code-based environments. Popfly represents a major innovation on the composition tool side, and does it in an elegant way that transformed the bootstrapping requirements of various kinds of services and APIs available in the cloud, into, literally, building blocks that people without any technical background can piece together (like LEGO!) and create all kinds of composite applications (or mashups). It also offers a provisioning and syndication system so these applications can be deployed (or embedded into web pages) anywhere on the Web (and coined the term "mashout").
Popfly has been compared to Yahoo! Pipes, which provides a very elegant composition tool for aggregating and manipulating syndicated content (and a wickedly cool implementation of JavaScript in its development environment). It is a very powerful platform in terms of programmability in the context of mashing up data. Another is Google Mashup Editor, which is also a very powerful tool that helps people quickly create mashup applications. Without turning this into a comparison of the three tools, in general I think each provides a distinct value and meet different needs. For example, Yahoo! Pipes provides a graphical drag-and-drop development model in using syndicated data, and Google Mashup Editor provides a code environment particularly targeted for utilizing Google services and products; though the target audience for both of them tend to be developers.
Popfly differs in its approach to democratize development by raising the level of abstraction and narrowing down options in block configurations. This greatly simplifies the process of piecing together building blocks, and it is this simplicity that offers Popfly's greatest advantage at making development social, and potentially more appealing to a wider audience.
The public beta provides many kinds of building blocks - display, fun & games, images & video (media), local information, maps, news & RSS, shopping, social networks, tools (programming utilities such as RegExp), and others. These building blocks represent configurable components that map to many different kinds of cloud-based service APIs, such as Flickr, Facebook, Live Search, AOL Video Search, Yahoo! Videos, Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Traffic, Digg, Yahoo! News, Twitter, Technorati, etc.; the list goes on. The rich collection (and growing) of building blocks allows not just the mashup of functions and data, but also adding an interchangeable visualization and interaction layer to the applications.
Popfly boostrapped these cloud-based service APIs, and exposed their methods, input parameters, and results as configurable elements in each building block. In addition, Popfly also pre-defines and maintains compatible relationships between these APIs so in many cases, default configurations are sufficient for creating a mashup without requiring the user to perform any configuration changes. Simply drag and drop, and connect the dots will do.
Popfly itself is implemented using a combination of traditional Web application technologies (ASP.NET, AJAX, JavaScript, HTML, etc.) hosted in a highly available server infrastructure, and a Silverlight implementation of the in-browser development environment.
The challenge for Popfly is reaching critical mass in adoption. Just like the Facebook Platform, which is really a software distribution platform, harnesses its power from the lively communities in Facebook. Popfly can achieve similar goals if its adoption can be turned into a self-propelling virtuous cycle, when a healthy growth in adoption can be facilitated.
Thus Popfly really is a platform in the Web 2.0 world. It provides an environment where people without a significant technical background can build stuff in, and hides the complexities in the underlying infrastructure. It also articulates many of the Web 2.0 principles, such as enabling participation and harnessing collective intelligence, leveraging the long tail, lightweight development models, rich user experiences, etc. For businesses and organizations looking to open up their data and services, or to interact with the user communities, participating in the Popfly ecosystem could be a simple way to enable viral adoption in the distribution channel (and for some, utilizing the monetization methods).
A 1-Minute Mashup Application
To illustrate Popfly's simplistic elegance, I created a mashup between a Flickr picture set and a visualization block that uses Silverlight. A snapshot of the application in edit mode is shown below.
Without going into a detailed step-by-step replay, all I did was drag/drop the Flickr block, configure it with the Flickr set ID that contains the pictures I want to use, drag/drop the Carousel block, then drag/drop a connector from the Flickr block to the Carousel block. Hooking up the output from Flickr with input parameters in Carousel was done automatically and seamless. That's it! And the application is now ready to be deployed across the Web.
The resulting mashup application is embedded below. I picked a presentation block that uses Silverlight, but there are blocks that are pure HTML and JavaScript too.
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Comments
Anonymous
November 27, 2007
I have been showing off Popfly as a great example of a Silverlight 1.0 application but my colleague DavidAnonymous
December 01, 2007
Context In an earlier blog post I talked about "Web as a Platform" (in Web 2.0's context) andAnonymous
December 01, 2007
Context In an earlier blog post I talked about "Web as a Platform" (in Web 2.0's contextAnonymous
December 01, 2007
Describing the Web 2.0 PlatformAnonymous
December 06, 2007
Popfly provides an environment where people without a significant technical background can build stuffAnonymous
December 06, 2007
Web 2.0 applications are taking on a new form. They are composite applications in nature, and increasinglyAnonymous
January 19, 2008
The comment has been removedAnonymous
January 19, 2008
The comment has been removedAnonymous
June 05, 2008
Primer Microsoft Popfly ( www.popfly.com ), currently in beta since October 2007, is a web site and tool to help people create and share web sites, mashups, and other kinds of experiences. This service, in my opinion, is a really interesting and innovativ