Mashups For The Masses !

As I have mentioned previously, I have recently been researching and playing with mashups and various sources of online data sources, such as Windows Live.  Well, this is obviously something that has caught wider interest in Microsoft as well, as they recently released an alpha version of a tool/technology called "Popfly" (http://www.popfly.com/).  This is a very cool, visual and interactive tool, for combining various building blocks and data sources, to build your own mashups, without all of the coding.

There are some heavy-hitter developers and marketing people on the Popfly team, but they haven't lost their sense of humor - this is from the Popfly FAQ page :

Q: Why did you call it Popfly?
A: Well, left to our own devices we would have called it "Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, May 2007 Community Tech Preview Internet Edition," but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.