Microsoft Popfly, Part 2: Mashups

(If you haven’t read Part 1 of my review yet, you might want to.)

The second, much more exciting half of Popfly is the Mashup creator. Mashups pull data from one or more web services and mash it together, using one web service to parse the data, or another to output the data, to create a unique web service.

Since I have very little experience with mashups, I simply followed the Popfly tutorial to create a Windows Live Local map with the last 10 twitter posts on it. I found the tutorial to be simple and easy to follow. I think I will be using Popfly to create mashups in the future, if I ever need to.

To create a mashup, you have to select “Create a mashup” on the Popfly home page, which brings you straight to the mashup designer.

To the left of the Mashup designer is the toolbox. You can drag and drop items from the toolbox onto the designer surface, and then connect them with lines using the pencil tool. After you drag and drop items onto the designer surface, you can change their settings or connect them to other blocks with lines. Here I have dropped a Twitter block onto the surface and am changing its settings.

Finally, when you’re finished, you can save your mashup to your account. Once again, whatever space your mashup takes up comes off your 25 MB of disk space.