Popfly beta

I have previously blogged about Popfly and even showed a video on how my daughter Sahana, an avid Facebook user, could personalize her Web experience with Popfly and Silverlight without writing any code.

Popfly is the first of a new generation of web tools that enables users of all skill levels to create or edit their own mash-ups for use within applications or to simply spice up their web sites. For example, the mash-up below is a custom Silverlight News Reader that displays headlines from MSDN.

This morning Steve Ballmer announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that Popfly beta is now available for you to try out and build fun, cool experiences. In a little over five months since the private Popfly alpha, we’ve seen the number of users grow from about 100 to over 50,000. Given the number of people who are on-line and are wanting to create and customize/personalize on-line experiences, I expect this number to grow significantly. You can read more about what’s new in the beta release on the Popfly Team Blog.

Another exciting thing about Popfly is that we have been able to partner with companies, both large and small, to build interesting blocks for Popfly. Some of these partners include social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as sites like Dapper, an online service that enables you to extract data from any Web site, and finally our partnership with internal teams at Microsoft like Windows Live which provides mapping, photos, and search blocks.

For those of you that already have a blog, Windows Live Spaces page, or a Facebook profile, check out Dan Fernandez’s blog for an assortment of Silverlight gadgets and widgets you can add to your site today.

Namaste!