Want CNET to notify you of price drops and the latest stories?
No, thank you Accept
X
iOS 17 Wish ListHearing Loss and DementiaAI in FitnessShokz Headphones on SaleMeal Subscription vs. TakeoutBest Solar CompaniesVerizon 5G Home InternetBest Credit Cards

Microsoft opens beta of Popfly mashup builder

The race for the best mashup builder picks up as Microsoft opens up Popfly at the Web 2.0 Summit.

headshots_martin_laMonica_140x100.jpg
headshots_martin_laMonica_140x100.jpg
Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.
See full bio
Martin LaMonica

Microsoft started an open beta program for its consumer-oriented mashup builder Popfly on Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Popfly is a hosted application that enables people to assemble mashups by dragging and dropping components, rather than writing code. It's built with Microsoft's Silverlight Web browser plug-in.

With Popfly, people assemble mashups by connecting blocks. Microsoft

When Microsoft released the alpha in May, it had prebuilt "blocks," or connections, to popular Web sites Flickr and MySpace.

Now it integrates with Facebook and people can create gadgets (also called widgets) that run on Windows Vista or Windows Live.

There are a growing number of these do-it-yourself Web authoring tools, including Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes. Here's a link to a review of three of those.

For business users, IBM has developed QEDWiki and Coghead, and other companies have created hosted application development services.