Technology scares me – Microsoft Popfly
I’ve somehow managed to get myself onto the Microsoft Popfly Alpha list. So, what is it?
Microsoft® Popfly™ is a web site and tool to help people create and share web sites, mashups, and other kinds of experiences.
It’s definitely web 2.0 then. It has social networking, it has mash-ups, things move, spin, dance and roll around while you’re creating things like you’re Doc Brown on acid. It even makes impressive use of MS Silverlight that makes you go “ooooh”. Within 5 minutes of signing in, I had an application that retrieves all my photos from facebook, and shows them in a list. I can use this on a web page, the Vista sidebar, my popfly homepage, or on my Live Space page. Five minutes. I didn’t have to write a single line of code. Very soon, I may be out of a job.
Okay, it’s a terrible example I know – there’s no mashing going on, but it does demonstrate how incredibly easy it’s become to interact with these services, and Facebook is a only a small speck on the landscape of choices. The usual suspects; Flickr, Twitter and Digg are all there as well as BBC Travel, Warcraft, Virtual Earth, even Google Checkout jump out at me in the possible mash-up list. What you get to do with Warcraft, I don’t know…yet.
Dan commented briefly this morning, that Facebook may be taking over the world, but I’m convinced this kind of service interaction is unnatural and quite possibly a part of those ONE campaigns Bono is always going on about – that we’ve all been promised is one of the early steps on the road to The Apocalypse.
