Microsoft Popfly announced
Since Microsoft Popfly was announced more than a week ago, the buzz about it has continued to grow. Microsoft Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications.
Popfly consists of two parts:
1. Popfly Creator, a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups.
2. Popfly Space, an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.
Think Microsft Visio or diagraming software when it comes to creating and linking the blocks. Different blocks have different functionality. Link multiple blocks such as a Twitter block, a GeoLocator block and a Virtual Earth block to create a Twittervision type mashup.
After a mashup is created, these mashups can be shared with others, creating a library of mashups. These mashups can be downloaded as a gadget and then be added to a webpage.
Popfly is also a creative and social space that is easy and fun to use. This is a system that will allow users not familiar with programming a method to create and use powerful gadgets for their websites.
Mainly, it’a pretty neat dev tool for non-professional developers, and it’s based on Silverlight. You can watch the Windows Media screencast (or download the QuickTime version) to find out more info about it.
Why Popfly? Here’s the official explanation:
Well, left to our own devices we would have called it “Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, May 2007 Community Tech Preview Internet Edition,” but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.
Definitely worth checking out. 
