I think the next few months will be the months of consumers making their own mash-ups. Microsoft is opening up popfly.ms (to showcase Silverlight), Intel’s Mash Maker looks very interesting, and AlchemyPoint’s Orchestr8 is still in private mode but just hit 1.0 this morning and is probably the coolest of the bunch.
Update: You might want to check out the comments on TechCrunch on the PopFly announcement (which TechCrunch wrote about after me, but what gives…). Lots of developer snootiness on there. Some people don’t quite realize that this isn’t a developer tool - it’s a cool way for regular folks to get into doing mash-ups. Nobody is expecting you to create a new app with it.
I have been playing around with Popfly for a while this morning (I will write more about Orchestr8 and Mash Maker later this week). It’s a very cool app, somewhat like Yahoo Pipes, but I find it easier to use. I mashed up all my feeds into one, put some twitters on a map etc. All very easy and intuitive.
And if you want to know why it’s called PopFly, David A. Utter has the answer:
Q Why did you call it Popfly?
A Well, left to our own devices we would have called it “Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, October 2007 Community Tech Preview Internets Edition,” but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.
And to be even cooler, they gave it a domain in Montserrat. What place, after all, is cooler than Montserrat, the Emerald Isle?
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