A week ago before I decided to register for MashCampBangkok, I saw many people entered Yahoo! Pipe as their topic. So I would enter something different so I proposed Popfly.
Popfly is a website that allows user to create mashup, webpage and game using Silverlight and online toolkit that Microsoft provides. For mashup creaton, which is the only part I’ve tried, various blocks are provided to help developers. With drag and drop, I can create a simple mashup which receive a search term from user and then look for photo from Flickr, Live Image Search, Yahoo Image Search and then show them in nice flying carousel in 5 minutes. Many people say Popfly is Microsoft’s Yahoo Pipe clone. But Jon Udell doesn’t think so. He thought they are complimentor. They can be used altogether to create an interesting mashup.
With Jon Udell’s comparison, I decided to create a mashup with Pipe and Popfly. I decided to use Pipe to aggregate and to process data. Then let Popfly consumes the output and render it to user. With little knowledge in Pipe, it took me 30-40 minutes to create a small pipe which process the result from Twitter Search API. I used Popfly since it beta and still remember how easy to create a mashup with it. So I thought I could do it in no time but I was wrong. And that’s why Popfly sucks.
After I used Popfly to create the mashup for 4 hours directly, I can summarize why Popfly sucks into these.
Continue reading...