The Unlamented Death of Popfly
Posted Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 2:39 pm by Alan Gallauresi (13 posts)
Microsoft’s mash-up engine Popfly died a quiet and unlamented death last week. Very few people seemed to even know it existed, but based on its colorful, icon-layered interface , its few visitors probably got the impression that it was some kind of Flash game creator – which it was, if you replace “Flash” with “Silverlight”, just like Microsoft would like you to do.
But the editorial emphasis on cheap “my first game” entries on the site’s homepage belied its underlying strength as a mash-up platform. Think of it as a system with the fluent routing of Yahoo’s Pipes but with the component architecture of traditional programming languages, all wrapped up in the gloss of Silverlight technology. Popfly users had the capability to take up components prebuilt by hard-core programmers as data sources – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr – and use them as building blocks in Popfly’s visual editor to create powerful, integrated apps with a modern look. Except they didn’t – they made Pong clones.
So the world won’t be crying for Popfly, but it’s hard to wonder if the same fate isn’t in store for other mash-up systems – was it Popfly’s candy colored wrapping or the hands-off visual programming mash-up idea itself that doesn’t have legs?
