popfly, a web 2.0 service with a fancy user interface powered by silverlight

Recently Microsoft tries his best to fight google in web service market. We all know that Microsoft is acquiring Yahoo with a price around $40 billion. Besides this, Microsoft also spends nearly $10 billion on live.com product line. Money talks. $10 billion leads to several fancy products, even though live.com is still not widely used. Here is a slide introducing Microsoft’s coolest things ever. Popfly is one of them. Basically ideas of Microsoft Popfly and Yahoo pipes are similar, i.e., to provide a service helping people to build their own mashup pages.

One important difference between popfly and pipes we must indicate is that popfly uses silverlight to present its rich internet interface while pipes using Ajax. Actually I am quite interested in the pros and cons of Silverlight, Flash and Ajax. I did a survey “Sliverlight vs Flash Player” last semester. You are interested about this topic too, just click to watch it. For user interface design, silverlight should be more flexible and powerful than Ajax. Because Ajax still needs HTML to presents its content. But silverlight has the chance to things in lower level.

 

But actually my concern is that now two of the three Rich Internet Application solutions are property products (silverlight and flash), which does not have public standards. A public standard for Rich Internet Application (just like HTML for World Wide Web) can make the game much fairer.

 

To learn popfly, I created a very simple Mashup, which reads the RSS feed of comp.lang.python and display it in a news reader. Here is what I got, python_cheetah .

I would like to say it is pretty cool. But comparing to pipes, popfly is harder for rookies like me to use. It has so many components and so many combinations, which introduce a much steeper learning curve.

 

For my favorite mashup, I would like to choose Machina Picture Puzzle

 

which is just a simple picture puzzle. The key point is that this game was created in a web 2.0 application within a browser. This is way out of my anticipation, too power for me to imagine.

 

–by Bin Chang

 

 

 

Tags: CS 292, Web 2.0, Mashups, Microsoft, Popfly, Silverlight, Pipes, Yahoo! Pipes