Popfly: Now open to all

This morning the Popfly team announced a new Beta and have removed the invitation-only restriction on that site. Just sign in to Popfly.com with your Live ID. You can create your own gadgets, mashups and web pages using Silverlight powered tools. No programming skills required.

PS: If someone from the Popfly team is reading this, how about adding a "Sign up" link on the landing and overview pages to eliminate the guess-work?

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We Popfly High, No Lie, You Know It

With what it states as "another piece in [Microsoft's] company-wide outreach in helping non-professional developers build everything from Xbox games to Robotics to custom Web applications using Windows Home Server", Microsoft today announced a new service called Popfly.It comprises a set of online visual tools so non-programmers can create web experiences, and a social aspect involving a community watering hole where people and view, share, remix and rate content. And did I mention Popfly was built using Silverlight? Popfly is currently accepting limited participants for its private alpha.

Personally speaking, Soma's and John Montgomery's talk about extending tools like Visual Studio to the Live world, is starting to make sense. Of course, this is just a step in that direction. John was kind enough to give us on the Silverlight team a sneak peek at Popfly at a Friday Beer Bash some weeks ago. As a fan of UNIX Pipes programming paradigm, I was immediately fascinated by some aspects of the Popfly Creator. We'd have loved to have shown this off circa Mix 07, but John and team rightly were looking at Maker Faire as the correct avenue to showcase this.

See one such Popfly creation in action here.

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