Microsoft Popfly and more

A few days ago I was granted access to Microsoft's new and dandy Mashup Editor called Popfly. Why did they call it "Popfly"? I have no idea. Popfly offers functionality like integration to their Visual Studio, the new Microsoft technology called the Silverlight plugin. I had high hopes for the Popfly technology since it is from Microsoft.

Unfortunately tonight I faced with the "Blue screen of death" in the Mashup editor world. I was working with the Popfly's Facebook block , which is like a Yahoo! Pipes widget, and I tried to get pictures of my friends from my network. Unfortunately it didn't work. Instead, I saw the default set of friends who looked like Microsoft employees. The only functionality that worked was that I could only see my information. The Popfly product has promise however it is still alpha. Unlike Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo! Pipes, Popfly offers UI aggregation interface as well as a .NET API interface. The competition has just begun between the major vendors in providing Mashup Interfaces. I am waiting for Oracle to join the party.

As I had suspected, Microsoft is slowing but surely integrating Facebook into its platform. Popfly is a great example of it. It looks like Microsoft and Google see immediate short term gains going the Web 2.0 route and not the Semantic Web route which seems to a better approach in the long term.

Learning from Mashups

Yesterday and today I spent time creating a Job Aggregator on Yahoo! Pipes and then building a frontend on Google Mashup Editor. After spending some time on Yahoo! Pipes editor, I was able to build a Job Aggregator which incorporated Google Base, Monster.com and Hotjobs. This is how it works:

1. User inputs a job query in the textbox
2. User hits submit
3. The request is sent to the Yahoo! Pipes engine
4. The Yahoo! Pipes engine inturn creates a copy of the request and submits it to Google Base, Monster.com and Hotjobs
5. The responses from each job site are sent back to Yahoo! Pipes engine.
6. Yahoo! Pipes inturn aggregators the responses and removes duplicates
7. Yahoo! Pipes engine then presents the data to the user.

The Yahoo! Pipe which I created can be seen at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=gl_zggBz3BGfqGtH1vC6Jw

Yahoo! Pipe also offers another service which is to create a rss feed for the service I just created.

I in turn took this RSS feed and rendered it in Google Mashup Editor. I have to say that Google Mashup Editor still needs alot of work. For instance I could not create URLs to extract information. I had to hard code the Yahoo! Pipes queries and just show the results. It was frustrating but for now it has to do. The front-end can be seen at:

• http://pipe-dream-jobs.googlemashups.com/

GME Team-If you are reading this entry then please add the url builder functionality. It will make your editor more robust. You might also think of adding gwt tags to promote your GWT product.

Data Aggregation with Pipes and more

Today I was working with Yahoo! Pipes and I created a simple module which aggregates data from my wife's, father-in-law's, sister-in-law's and my blog and sorted them from the latest to the oldest published. It is quite neat. The process is quite easy however I couldn't get Yahoo! Pipes to extract feeds from blogspot's rss feed and my brother-in-law's rss feed. I used blogspot's atom feed and my sister-in-law's blog's rdf feed. Yahoo! Pipes could not read:

• http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
• http://fabsadventures.com/xml-rss2.php

I liked the way I could combine the feeds into one feed and then sorted the blog entries in the feed. I was not able to aggregate feeds with Google Mashup Editor. I am still learning that editor. For a quick work around with Google Mashup Editor, first subscribe to the feeds via Google Reader and then create one feed which can do all of the aggregation. Then manipulate the aggregated Google Reader feed via Google Mashup Editor. Yahoo! Pipes does not offer any way of adding presentation components like CSS, graphics or JavaScript. Here is the link to the Yahoo! Pipe which I created:

• http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=uklNCdpv3BGhTon3jUnRlg
  

I like them both but either one met all of my requirements.

Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo! Pipes

This evening I got an invite to use Google Mashup Editor. I have to say that I have been impressed. Unlike Yahoo! Pipes, this Google Mashup IDE is an WYSIWYG editor. I played with it for a few minutes and I really liked it. The samples that they provided are good enough for a running start and the tag documentation is quite good.

I am currently working with Lancaster County Web Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD aka 911) data which is provided as a RSS feed. I am trying to render them on Google Maps. I tried to the exact thing with Yahoo! Pipes and I felt it was less user friendly. It is true that with movable Widgets and connecting with them with "Pipes" can be fun but it can also be a frustrating experience. Yahoo! Pipes reminded of the times I worked TIBCO BusinessWorks Editor or the AquaLogic Fuego tool for BPM. It is great once you know but the learning curve can be quite steep. I was and still am frustrated with the widgets that Yahoo Pipes had since some widgets don't work with each other. This is typical of any UI friendly editor compared with any WYSIWYG editor.

With WYSIWYG editors, you can look at the XML code and decipher the programming logic. With UI friendly editors, they may look cool but it can be a frustrating experience. For example the Yahoo Pipes editor had a widget for Yahoo Search but I didn't find one for Google Search. I wanted to run the query "children hate animals" against various search engines but it became a frustrating experience. If any Yahoo! Pipes lover is out there, here are few requirements which might make the Pipes editor more pleasant.

1. Sort the widgets out and tell the user which widgets work with what
2. Ability to create custom widgets and save them in a library.
   
3. Allow users to publish their custom widgets - this would allow a larger user base since users will promote their custom widgets
4. Allow users to publish their Pipes on different websites (kinda like Google Maps)
5. Have contests for the best Yahoo Pipe in each category. Publish the widgets and feeds for each contest.

I need to do more research on Google's Mashup Editor but right off the bat it would be nice to see:

1. Able to integrate other Google products like Google Talk, Gmail, etc.,etc
2. Index Google Mashups for higher visibility
3. Ability to publish Google Mashups and put AdSense around it. Incentive for the publisher
4. Tighter integration with Blogger
5. More to come.