Popfly and the web

Three years ago when I was trying to get a PhD in London, I was researching XML web services and their potential. I happened to mention in one of my articles about an internet organism of services which call each-other and build applications accessible anywhere. Not to get dissapointed, I stumbled some time ago on Microsoft Popfly. It seems that small and largely unnoticed bit of application is the very beginning of that organism. An UDDI directory disguised in a very neat silverlight interface (all very new and impressive) Popfly allows you to create chains of services which result in simple applications (simple for the moment), which can be created even by the most beginner computer geek. I quickly made an application which displays on a world map the location of the user. I mean quickly - 1 minute? Obviously combining a service which returns the IP with one that returns the longidtude and latidute based on an IP and finally one that displays the map. This service chains are called mashups and over the next few years we'll probably begin to have a lot of them. Not to get developers out of the way totally (just yet !), the Popfly mashups can integrae with Visual Studio for a more complex experience. Moreso, I agree that having a lot of services available is the key to all this and for the moment you have a nice selection of basic stuff, as well as some more advanced bits. You could easily create Facebook mashups, put pictures from your Flickr account on a spinning cube! or indeed put your World of Warcraft character in a mashup that displays it toghether with your MySpace profile. Just a last thought - Popfly is in Beta still and inside it there are also some interesting issues, such as a silverlight game creator (alpha version for now). Give them a spin!