Anthony J. BradleyI just got a heads up from Microsoft’s PR firm that, as of August 24, Microsoft is discontinuing the Popfly consumer mashup environment. “All sites, references, and resources including games and mashups that have been created will be taken down.” They say look to http://www.microsoft.com/mashups for more information. Right now I can’t find anything about Popfly at this URL. There is an alert on www.popfly.com with a link to this blog post which has little information but a palpable tone of disappointment.
Indeed, it is too bad. Popfly was, IMO, one of the coolest user experiences with mashups. The heads up says that Popfly “set out to do something new” and seems to imply they were successful in that they learned a lot that will find its way into other products like XNA, Kodu, Web Platform Installer and Express. It doesn’t feel like success to me.
Let’s give Popfly a moment of silence. I thought it was a harbinger of things to come, but unfortunately it was not long for this world. It is interesting that Microsoft would close shop on Popfly when the consumer and enterprise mashup drums beat on. I don’t beleive this is a statement on the health of mashups but more a question about Microsoft’s strategy. They are pursuing enterprise mashups with Sharepoint (minus the very cool Popfly user experience) but it looks like they are waving goodbye to consumer mashups.
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1 response so far ↓
1 Sayan Ghosh August 6, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Agree. All I can say to popfly is “this world was never meant for someone as beautiful as you”.