Popfly is a free, easy to use tool, to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. If you can use Powerpoint you can use Popfly to build mashups, gadgets, and web pages...just like a real developer. It is really simple...yet powerful.

Nik Cubrilovic says "Popfly is a big leap forward from the competitors above because it lets you do so much more, and it is one of the nicest web application interfaces I have ever seen. With Popfly, you can create applications, mashups, web pages and widgets (gadgets) and it is all tied together in a social network (as part of the Live Spaces platform) where you can connect with other users and publishers of applications. Mashups are created by dragging in and connecting ‘blocks’ which produce an output. Blocks are modules that connect to various web services API’s, and even today there are dozens of different blocks that work with a whole variety of different web services."

Ryan Stewart, a writer for ZDnet says; "Microsoft announced one of the cooler Silverlight applications to be built today when they took the curtains off of Popfly. I didn’t get a beta invite to Popfly, but after seeing the screencasts and reading the blog reports, I’m really excited about it. It’s a psudeo-competitor to Yahoo pipes, but the user interface makes it much more accessible to the general public and makes creating mashups a lot easier."

This is the first of lots of cool tools and applications enabled by Microsoft's Silverlight and Expression Designer tool suite. Microsoft has always been very strong in developer tools with Visual Studio. Now designers and web creators will be able to enjoy new tools from Microsoft that work seamlessly with Visual Studio. Cool stuff !!