Microsoft Popfly: Web Mashup Service

Microsoft Popfly is in a late beta release. It is a free web service that somewhat resembles Yahoo! Pipes in that both can be used to create web mashups without needing to write code. Popfly requires installing Microsoft's Silverlight platform (their answer to Adobe Flash). Silverlight is in Release Candidate 1 stage and is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. I installed it on both platforms to try it out.

Popfly is incredibly slow compared to Pipes. It was slow on a notebook running Windows Vista with a Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM. It was abysmally slow on a 1st generation Mac mini (PowerPC). Scrolling through the blocks sidebar on the left was an exercise in frustration on the Mac mini and not much better on a Core 2 Duo PC. Unnecessary visual frills like the slowly rotating cubes containing function blocks in the edit mode probably don't help things. Earth to Microsoft Popfly Team: Dump the frills and give users a fast simple interface like Yahoo Pipes. What is the point of having rotating cubes on a workflow design screen? Read Walden Pond sometime: Simplify, simplify, simplify.

The code blocks are not as intuitive to use as Pipes. Nor do they seem to offer the power and flexibility of Pipes. There are a few interesting features such as the ability to see the underlying code of a function block as well as the capability to create your own blocks. However, for the moment, you would be better off using Yahoo! Pipes to build quick mashups IMHO.