This morning I received my invite to Microsoft’s Popfly, currently in alpha and by invite only.
Popfly allows users to very quickly combine display objects with some of our favourite data sources. Flickr, Facebook and Digg to name few.
Select the display module your after, drag and drop from the Blocks panel on the left, to the center stage, then drag your data provider to the stage. To connect the 2, simply click the blue circle one the side of the module, then select the module you wish to join it to.
In my case I used the news reader module, and an RSS data source. There is a small amount of configuration for each item, like pasting in your RSS feed address, but very very simple to use, requiring no coding knowledge to use.
Once your done you can hit preview and see your Mashup. Popfly also allows you to create a webpage and embed your Mashups into that page.
Overall this looks like a great product already and only in Alpha, should be very appealing to a wide range of people once it hits release which I expect will be some time in 2008. It just offers so many possibilities, one example is a mash of Geotagged flickr images with Virtual Earth, which displays the photos overlaid on a map at the location they were actually taken.
You can sign up for an invite @ http://Popfly.com, requires Silverlight.
