Want more info on Popfly?
I recently got into the Popfly alpha, and have been playing around with it off and on for the last week or two. Here's a screenshot of a simple, compact News Reader that pulls in RSS feeds from the blogs of the members of the Microsoft's DPE team that covers Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. I call it the HLD DPE News Reader. It took literally between 10-15 minutes to create this News Reader.
Here's the block diagram. As you can see, it only uses three blocks: the "RSS" block (one block for each blog, the "Combine" block for combining lists of things, and the "News Reader" block for presenting blog posts in a compact form with navigation. (BTW, this simple mashup works without the news reader block, as well -- each blog post shows up in a mostly unformatted list with breaks between each post.)
Now, here's the same HLD DPE News Reader intalled as a Vista Gadget. Turning the News Reader into a gadget and installing it on the sidebar took about 1 minute. You can see the size is just a bit too big for the side bar.
If you pull the gadget off the sidebar, it looks like this. IMO, takes up a bit more space than is required, but this is just the alpha, after all.
Here's the same Popfly News Reader mashup on a Windows Live Spaces page I created just for this purpose. This took about 5 minutes to create and deploy, but most of that was creating a new Live Spaces page to host the Reader for the purpose of this blog. :-)
Here's a clipping from the admin screen where you can see and grab the HTML to embed your Popfly creation anywhere you want, or you can publish to with a couple clicks to any blog that supports the MetaBlog API.
Finally, you may be wondering what the little grey rectangle in the upper right corner is for.... Beyond a place to display a logo, it gives you the name of the Popfly creation, who made it, and the how many "stars" it's been given by the community. You can also click to grab it for your own use, or use it as a template that can then be customized. (Note: I haven't tried these features yet).
This is what it looks like in the "Expanded" view.
It's amazing how much creative power Popfly puts into the hands of "average" users. I can't wait to see how this evolves!
John Mullinax is a Platform Strategy Advisor with Microsoft's DPE Team. Before joining Microsoft in 2006, John held a vartiety of positions at Ford Motor Company, most recently leading IT services strategy to support explosive business growth in China. Other positions included: Enterprise Architect, Application Portfolio Management, Technology Governance, and Product Manager. Prior to joining Ford, John earned his MBA at the University of Washington. Before that, he was Director of Elections for Douglas County, Washington, where he conducted the first Federal mail-ballot election in the USA. Subsequently, he joined the Secretary of State's office as a consultant working with county election officials in Washington state to improve operational effectiveness, integrity, and security (aka, to prevent the kind of debacle we saw in Florida in 2000).
