First Impressions of PopFly

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Looks like you can’t view the pages unless your on the alpha too!

I’ll take a look to see if this is true or not

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After the annoucement of Popfly a couple of weeks ago i was keen to see it in action

Today i received an invite to the alpha so i thought i’d spend ten minutes having a quick look to see what it can do.

I’m very impressed with how easy it is to get something up and running and i could see how end users will be able to use it. Dont’ get me wrong i’m not expecting my mom to be able to do it but reasonably tech-savvy users shouldn’t have any problems picking it up

The mashup interface is simple and straightforward to use and you send data from one “block” to another simply by clicking them and joining them up!

There are plently of blocks to get going with but hopefully more web services will get exposed in this way

There is a nice little tutorial which shows you how to mashup Twitter with Virtual Eash (via a geonames block) which shows off nicely how it all works

After this i went out alone to see if i could get some results so i mashed up my flickr account with a photo flip style Silverlight “thingy” to show off a couple of pictures from my recent wedding (i’ve only just started using Flickr so it’s all a bit empty!)

It’s all very basic but to create the page and the mashup took about ten minutes

Have a look for yourself here

It’s all very promising in my opinion as long as it gets enough support which at the moment i can’t see why not

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Andy Parkes is Technical Director at Coventry based IT support company IBIT Solutions. Formerly, coordinator of AMITPRO and Microsoft Partner Area Lead for 2012-2013. He also isn't a fan of describing himself in the third person.

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4 thoughts on “First Impressions of PopFly

  • I just started playing with Popfly myself and agree that it is a pretty slick system.
    The tutorials are good and easy to follow. Being able to create the Twittervision type system in 10 minutes really shows what Popfly can do.
    I wrote up my first impressions on Popfly
    and gave links to the screencasts from the Popfly group.
    My understanding is that you can export your Popfly mashup as a gadget to post on your site, and others should be able to see that. The problem I have heard is that the gadget can be slow to render and might have problems displaying.

  • Sririam you are correct. You can embed the object into any web page. You have to select the ‘Embed It’ option which generates HTML code that is added to a website.
    Exporting a mashup as a gadget is how you create a Sidebar Gadget for Vista.

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