Popfly - new Silverlight mash-up maker - is now alpha!

Popfly is a new tool from Microsoft for people who have great some ideas about how to use technology, but might lack the software development skills to realize them.  Basically, it's a fun and easy way to build and share mash-ups, gadgets and Web pages using pre-built “Blocks” that connect to online services.  You can easily build your first mash-up in minutes using the built-in tutorials and community features to get help fast.

You can design your own custom blocks or use the ones that are already availabe in Popfly.  Plus, Popfly provides an online community for all non-professional developers to share their creations ranging from mashups to custom AJAX-applications to Windows projects. Nik Cubrilovic, from TechCrunch, has a review here. 

For now, the alpha testing is limited to just a select group of a few thousand, but expect it to be opened up in time.  In fact, I'm not yet on the alpha myself (but am working on that!).   :-)  If I can get on the apha program I'll have more (and more detailed comments). 

The pre-built blocks very much focus on the social networking and consumer space.  In fact, it's basically a business intelligence report generator and visualization tool for consumers!  There's no doubt that everything that Popfly creates can be created inside the enterprise, but not by a business user in 3 minutes!  Powerful!