Yes, I'm on the Microsoft Popfly Team!
It's been an exciting year! As John sums up, I joined him almost a year ago (when he was a team of one) and had a blast creating and constantly evolving a prototype of what is now Microsoft Popfly. During 2006, we demoed it again and again to one executive after another. Last fall, I got to demo it to Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, then later even Steve Ballmer. It was all pretty surreal.
We've grown into a decent-sized team and have been in hard-core execution mode all year. And as of this morning, we are public! We're still an invitation-only alpha, and we still have quite a bit of work ahead of us, but it's a major milestone nonetheless! (Note that our team is also responsible for Visual Studio Express, but I don't have anything to do with that.)
To get a good sense of what Popfly is all about, check out the video recorded by Dan & Suzanne from our team. It's all about having fun creating and sharing software. But you can create some very useful things quite easily, too. Here's a live example that is clearly in the fun category rather than useful:
This displays the beginning of the most recent comment on my blog's most recent post in ransom-note style (thanks to Flickr). I created this by mashing a few blocks together, and only had to type three characters of code (and that was only to work around a bug... remember, we are an alpha!). Add a comment to this post, and watch it update! (You might have to wait awhile for your comment to appear and the RSS feed to update.)
