My Popfly invitation came through during the Memorial Day weekend, and I signed myself up. Basically, you can create mashups online by dropping blocks on your design surface, setting their properties, and connecting them. The tutorial helps you create a 4-block project that mashes up Twitter with Virtual Earth, with the help of an adapter block that converts geographic names to coordinates, My Popfly invitation came through during the Memorial Day weekend, and I signed myself up. Basically, you can create mashups online by dropping blocks on your design surface, setting their properties, and connecting them. The tutorial helps you create a 4-block project that mashes up Twitter with Virtual Earth, with the help of an adapter block that converts geographic names to coordinates, and a Timer block to refresh the display every few seconds.There are dozens of Microsoft-provided blocks to choose from, and dozens more blocks that have been shared by users.You can create Web pages online, and include your mashups in your Web pages. You can also embed your mashups in other Web pages you may have by copying and pasting the code for an iframe.There’s also some basic social networking functionality, and a discussion board. If you’re inclined to do more serious development, you can download Popfly Explorer, which is an add-on to Visual Studio 2005. At this point I’ve done the basic online tutorial and have just begun to play with the Explorer. I’ll have more to say when I’ve spent more time playing with the product. Meanwhile, you can see several mashups on John Montgomery’s blog. Software Development