Popfly Hits A Homerun

What a shameless pun… Regardless, Popfly, Microsoft’s online mashup creation utility, thoroughly impressed me as both a simple web programming tool and in comparison with Yahoo! Pipes, a similar utility. If you are unfamiliar with mashups, a post I wrote last week or the Wikipedia entry can quickly familiarize you with the concept. Popfly was released in May 2007, so is younger than Pipes, and is still a public beta. These facts help to alleviate frustration caused by encountering kinks that should be worked out in a fully developed program. Popfly is based on the new Microsoft Silverlight technology, a Flash/Shockwave/Quicktime competitor released in April 2007. To sum up the most obvious differences immediately evident in the Popfly and Pipes creation environment, MS Product Manager Dan Fernandez said, “Yahoo Pipes is more about using syndicated data. This is about making application development more social.” This shows in the richer, more varied mashups that users have created in Popfly, including games that remix the old classics Asteroids and Whack-A-Mole. There are also more data sources are available including Facebook, World of Warcraft (oh no, the Pipes/Popfly battle is over before it began), IMDb, XBox Live, and a myriad of others including offerings from competitors Yahoo! and Google. Overall, Popfly seems pretty matured and impressive, and was named #21 on PC World’s list of The 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year for 2007.

I immediately found a few different mashups that I felt had interesting data displayed in a functional and pleasing manner. Chris Bellande already described the Europe Weather mashup, which is a decent interactive weather map for some major European cities. Another worthwhile creation is a US crime data map for 2006, a lovely little app that shows both my current and future home cities as individually having more crimes per thousand than LA and NYC combined. Thanks Popfly. However, my favorite mashup that I found in a quick search was Child Education Levels in India. This mashup displays the percentage of children not in school for various cities in India in different colors displaying different levels. It also has an arrow in each color box showing whether the percentage is increasing, decreasing, or staying constant. This type of quantification and trending display could be remixed with a map display in innumerable different uses, and this is the first mashup I have seen that incorporates both types of statistics.

-Michael Wurz

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

~ by mikewurz on March 28, 2008.