Welcome to Popfly

Being a personal evangelist for the Microsoft family of products (the entire AMA web presence was built and is maintained on a Windows machine…), I just wanted to introduce everyone to Microsoft Popfly (if Apple made it, everyone would have heard about it by now, I’m sure). 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.

So what can you do with this? If you’re interested in building your own web page or creating some really nifty mashups (web app that combines the functionality of two or more web sites…i.e. Facebook and MySpace), you can do it all without writing a single line of code. You can throw all of your Facebook friend info on the same page of all your Halo 3 stats. Then click and drag to connect all your friends and their Halo 3 gamer stats. You use “blocks” that you click-and-drag onto your web page; you can then send data between the blocks and so on. You can also add your own HTML code if desired. Spend a few hours with it and you’ll be amazed at all the creations you can put together. All of this is done through a browser-based Silverlight application (you will need to download Microsoft Silverlight – it’s just like Flash!!!), so you don’t need any new software programs.

Why am I telling you this? Marketers are creative by nature, so you should enjoy this. Also, whenever something new pops up (no pun intended), marketing departments feel the need to use it…even if it doesn’t make any real sense. I expect Popfly to have such an effect, although I think this could make a lot of sense. Enjoy.

A special thanks to Bill Gates and all the wonderful people at Microsoft for actually innovating technology, unlike a certain aforementioned company. Go Microsoft!!!

http://www.popfly.ms/Home.aspx