NYTimes Profiles PopFly

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/business/10slipstream.html

 

Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.

Last fall, his team introduced an intriguing software Web service called Popfly that is intended to make it possible for nonprogrammers to plug together Web components and data sources quickly to create useful new Web services. For example, news feeds could be added to digital images, or data lists to maps.

Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by

Steven A. Ballmer

, Microsoft’s chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 “mashups”: new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.

The mashup is at the heart of a generation of Lego-style software that is emblematic of the second generation of the Internet. Both Google and Yahoo have developed tools to help Web users display apartment rentals on maps, or build complicated Web sites like

TripTouch.com

, which is intended to offer diverse local information for travelers.

The Popfly programmers, however, have gone a step further in an effort to design a tool that is intended for a generation of Web users who are familiar with the Internet but are not skilled programmers.

 

 

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