Microsoft has released an alpha version (invitation-only) of Popfly, which lets mere mortals create mashups, live Web pages, gadgets/widgets etc using simple drag-and-drop programming.
Mashups are built using little red blocks that can be linked together. They can also be opened up to display, for example, JavaScript code, that can be tweaked manually. However, it's assumed that most users will simply re-use shared blocks. (And users can rate blocks to make it easier to find the good stuff.)
Microsoft's demos use blocks called things like Twitter, Flickr, Virtual Earth, GeoNames, Timer and so on, linked together. So, you can take text from Twitter every 10 seconds, get the location from the user's place name, and plot it on Virtual Earth with pictures. Something that complicated takes a couple of minutes.
If you think in programming terms, there are content blocks (eg Flickr, Digg, World of Warcraft), transformational blocks (eg timer) and output blocks (eg Virtual Earth). But ordinary users don't need to know that.
If you want to do something more original, you can load the project into Visual Studio, for example. In fact, if you really like Ajax coding, you don't have to use any blocks at all -- but you can still use the storage, publishing and sharing infrastructure. Programmers will also be able to create blocks and encapsulate services and charge for them.
Popfly includes an HTML Web page creator adapted from Office Live. This lets you select themes, do the usual drag-and-drop page layout, add your mashups and save the result as a Microsoft Space page.
The point of doing a private alpha is to assemble a couple of thousand users who will feed back enough info to expand the system, and also help create lots of new blocks.
Popfly runs wherever Silverlight runs, which means IE6/IE7 and Firefox 2.0.
At Techcrunch , Nik Cubrilovic says: "Popfly is a big leap forward from the competitors ... because it lets you do so much more, and it is one of the nicest web application interfaces I have ever seen." It certainly looks a lot nicer than Yahoo Pipes, and the demo makes it seem easier to use -- but don't bank on that until you try it.
CNet has a news story, Microsoft Popfly service does mashups.
There's a video on Channel 9, for developers, and http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=91175 should pop up a video demo. Or if not, use this one: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/media/en/popfly/PopFlyin15.wvx
