Microsoft Popfly

» see popfly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i did not use popfly. in 2007 i was finishing my engineering degree in ankara with a firefox install and an aversion to anything that needed silverlight on top. by then silverlight was the runtime microsoft kept asking the web to install so that microsoft properties looked richer than they would inside plain html. popfly was one of those properties, a web app that ran inside silverlight, which meant you could not even visit the homepage on a plain browser without first agreeing to a 30 megabyte plugin download. that was not a deal i wanted to make for a mashup builder.

popfly was microsoft's developer division entry into the 2007 wave of drag-and-drop tools for building web mashups. the public beta opened on may 18 2007 at mix '07, the silverlight conference, hosted by adam nathan and john montgomery. you logged in with a windows live id and got 100 megabytes of cloud storage. then you arranged "blocks" representing data sources and visualizations on the canvas. yahoo pipes had shipped a similar idea three months earlier with no silverlight requirement. popfly aimed at a friendlier audience with a richer surface.

the product had four pieces stitched together. the mashup creator and the game creator did most of the work. the web creator and popfly space handled the rest. the game creator drew the most attention since you could lay out a 2d sprite game with no code and export the result to a facebook embed. by june 2009 microsoft had moved budget out of consumer-facing silverlight efforts. on july 16 2009 the popfly team posted that the service would close on august 24. techcrunch read the closure as a verdict on silverlight in the browser. the popfly site went dark on schedule.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it tried to do ~

the mashup idea in 2007 was that an end user with no programming skill should be able to glue a twitter feed to a google map and get a usable little dashboard out of it. yahoo pipes did this on the server with a node graph and json. popfly did it in the browser with silverlight rendering the canvas and storing the result on microsoft servers. you could publish your mashup as a web page or embed it in a windows live spaces blog. the game creator subset was the closest microsoft got to a low-code product that ordinary teenagers would actually share with each other.

the press attention popfly got in 2007 was friendly. scoble called it the most interesting thing the developer division had shipped that year. teachers used the game creator in middle school computer labs in the us. the trouble was that anything you built lived inside silverlight, which meant that anyone you shared it with needed to install silverlight too. by 2008 most users were treating the plugin install prompt the way they treated the activex install prompt.

~ why silverlight was the wrong bet ~

silverlight had its own reasons to be losing the open web argument by mid 2009. the iphone had shipped in 2007 without flash and without silverlight, and apple had no plan to support either. chrome had launched in 2008 and the chrome team was openly anti-plugin. the browsers that mattered for the next decade were already moving toward html5 canvas and css animations. microsoft itself was hedging by funding ie9 work on html5 video.

popfly was tied to silverlight at every layer, the canvas and the embed widget both. if silverlight slowed down, popfly slowed down with it. the july 2009 closure announcement framed the move as part of a broader refocus driven by the recession. the techcrunch coverage and the programmableweb post-mortem both read it as silverlight giving up on consumer reach. silverlight itself would limp on inside enterprise dashboards for another few years before microsoft retired it for good in 2021.

~ how it ended ~

the shutdown was clean by microsoft standards. the popfly team posted the closure notice on the official blog on july 16 2009, six weeks before the lights went off. accounts were given an export window to download their mashups as html and silverlight bundles. the popfly.com domain stopped resolving as the service. by 2010 the only public traces of popfly were techcrunch posts and a few youtube tutorials made by the developer division for the launch.

by mid 2009 i was deep into computer vision work and had stopped tracking the silverlight news cycle. when microsoft retired silverlight itself in october 2021, popfly had been dead for twelve years already and the obituary cycle that followed did not name it. the small set of users who had built games and mashups on the canvas had already been pushed onto scratch and the rising wave of unity tutorials by then.

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