Microsoft released Popfly, a new mashup tool, in private alpha today. There are around 50 predefined blocks which can be dragged to the design surface where the blocks are connected to create a new mashup. Popfly is kind of a foolproof, slick version of Yahoo! pipes based on the Silverlight browser plugin. For geocoding there is a predefined block GeoNames to access geonames.org web services. Here a screen shot from the tutorial :
The GeoNames block supports five operations, all of which are restricted to the US:
- getLatitudeAndLongitude : geocoding, returns lat/lng
- lookupOnPlaceName : geocoding, returns lat/lng and place info
- lookupOnZipCode : geocoding with zipcode
- lookupOnCityState : geocoding with US state and city
- lookupOnLatitudeLongitude : reverse geocoding (findNearbyPostalCodes)
TechCrunch writes about Popfly : “Microsoft are the latest entrants in this market, and they have completely leapfrogged every other application we have seen so far.”
John Montgomery, the GPM of Popfly, is blogging about the Genesis of Popfly.
Watch the demo screen cast to see how easy it is to geocode the location of twitter users and display it on VirtualEarth. (WMV, Quicktime)
Not only if Popfly a funny toy it also has the potential to help web service providers monetize their services. It is still difficult if not impossible to combine web services with advertisements. A centralized mashup platform like Popfly could include ads in the presentation layer and share revenues with the mashup creator and the web service providers. Is Popfly going to be the google adsense killer the world is desperately waiting for?
GeoNames Blog 
[…] team have produced a funny tutorial over the holidays where the team members play the roles of the Popfly blocks (modules). In the video they create a facebook mashup to display facebook friends on Virtual […]
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