Popfly Team Site: Blog

Popfly in September

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 05:12:14 GMT

As September is winding down, we’ve got some site enhancements that are now live for you:

1. Enhanced News Feeds

Now you can see when people win badges, leave comments on projects, get high scores, and more.

2. The Super Winner Badge

Get this by winning 100 different games.

3. See What's Ripped From What

4. See Your Pending Friend Requests on your Profile Page

Enjoy!

Popfly Game Creator Now in Beta

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:19:29 GMT

It’s a great time to come back to Popfly and check out all the improvements! Here are some features we just released as part of the Game Creator Beta:

Features for everyone:

New profile pages, with easier ways to view people’s projects, friends, recent activity, and more
View anyone's favorite projects
Earn badges by creating compelling content, being a good game player, making friends, or just being lucky! Learn more about badges here.
Lots of performance improvements and bug fixes

Features for game creators of all skill levels:

Undo support for actor appearance editing
Insert images and videos directly into your actor or scene
Play audio from the Web or an uploaded file without custom code
Customize actor edges with a simple drag-and-drop view
Nudge elements into their proper positions with arrow keys
Preview any scene inside the motion dialog and custom code dialog
Jump to any scene when playing a game in the Play editor

Features for advanced game authors:

New properties that can be used at runtime	Actor: Name, TypeName, VisualX, VisualY, VisualWidth, VisualHeight, Scene: Width, Height
Console in the custom code dialog
Scroll wheel & tab support in the XAML & JavaScript editor
"Current Scene" support, for more generic actors and scenes that are easier to clone

Features for game embedders:

Add ?mute=true to the URL to mute the game by default

Features for mashup authors:

New StringFormatter block
New ImageSlideShow block
Image scraping support in the RSS block

Popfly at Penny Arcade Expo

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:19:57 GMT

Members of the Popfly team will be attending PAX. Stop by the Microsoft booth Friday at 5:00 PM and Saturday and Sunday at 11:30 AM for to check out a demo of the Popfly Game Creator and the chance to win cool prizes!

Technorati Tags: PAX,Penny Arcade Expo,Casual Games,Silverlight,Popfly

Popfly Goes to the Olympics

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:47:43 GMT

For those of us who can't afford front-row seats at the Olympics, Popfly is proud to bring a veritable decathlon of games built using the Popfly Game Creator including Archery, Boxing, Diving, Gymnastics, Long Jump, Soccer, Synchronized Swimming, Track & Field, and Weightlifting. Come visit our site and try them out.

Technorati Tags: Popfly,Olympics,Casual Games,Silverlight

Time to Brag!

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:29:17 GMT

Have you created a really cool Popfly project? If so, we want to hear from you! Click here to send us your story and you may be featured on our site!

Technorati Tags: Popfly

July Popfly Update

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:52:56 GMT

Summer has hit Seattle. The days are warm, the evenings pleasantly cool, and the developers are hard at work adding stuff to Popfly. What's in this release? Quite a bit, including:

Game High Scores. Popfly games now support automatic tracking of your high scores and win/loss records. You can compare your performance among your friends and make new friends with other players. When you turn your Popfly game into a Facebook game, you get all these features (and more) among your Facebook friends.
Alternate Block. In the mashup "tweak" view we've added the idea of alternative blocks -- blocks that can be substituted for each other since they are functionally equivalent. For example, you can now easily substitute a carousel output block for a photo tile output block since they both take the same input.
Rating System Facelift. We gave the ratings system a facelift. Instead of giving projects a 1-5 star rating, you can now choose to become a “fan” of any project. The new system is a lot more like the system used on Digg, where you can give something a thumbs-up.
Improved Combine Block. The old combine block could combine at most three fields from three inputs. The new combine block can take multiple blocks and combine them.
Actor Reordering. By default, actors added to a scene are rendered on top of actors added earlier (if they overlap). Now you can reorder your actor instances at any time.
Behavior Reordering. The order you list your behaviors can matter, and now you can reorder them at any time.
Filter Behaviors by Scenes. Do you want an actor to behave one way in one scene, but a different way in another? You can now do this easily with scene filtering.
More Ways to Discover Interesting Content. Looking for some popular Popfly games you haven’t played yet? Just look right here.
Add New Scenes of Any Type. If you previously deleted your How to Play, Won, or Lost scene, you can now add them back. This is especially important now that Won and Lost scenes have significance for Popfly’s automatic record tracking.
Automatic Asset Prefetching. If your games use supporting files (such as images, videos, and audio), we now ensure they are downloaded before the gameplay starts, resulting in a much smoother experience for your players.

For those of you who are educators, we've also added some lesson plans drawn up by Mark Frydenberg of Bentley College. These should help teachers use Popfly as a tool in high schools and introductory college courses.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Silverlight, Casual Games

Popfly June Update

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:46:23 GMT

With summer upon us, it's time to update Popfly again. Yesterday we updated our servers with a host of new features including updates to the game creator, the mashup editor, and many overall site improvements. Adam Nathan has written an excellent post on a lot of these improvements, but some of the biggest are:

Full Facebook applications. For a long time you've been able to publish Popfly creations to Facebook, but now you can make them full Facebook applications, including the features necessary to use Facebook's friends network to invite your friends to use your applications.
New mashup editor UI. The mashup editor is now consistent with the game creator UI, which should make it a lot easier to use.
Publish your own game actors. Until now, if you created an actor for your game you couldn't share it. Now you can.
Better project page. We've improved the page that's generated for each project, making the layout easier to understand and adding information such as the number of views each project has gotten.

There's a lot more in this release, so come back and visit.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Mashups, Silverlight, Casual games

Games We Love

Fri, 16 May 2008 20:18:21 GMT

Our announcement two weeks ago of the Popfly Game Creator caused a lot of people to come to the site and build interesting, fun games. Some of the team's personal picks are now on our Wiki. Check them out!

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Silverlight, games

Popfly Game Creator Video Tutorials

Mon, 05 May 2008 20:31:07 GMT

The Popfly Game Creator comes with a set of video tutorials on the Popfly Wiki that show you how to use it. If you just watch one video today, you should probably watch something else, but if you are going to watch two, watch one of these.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, casual games, tutorials, screencast

Popfly Introduces Game Creator Alpha

Fri, 02 May 2008 17:44:45 GMT

Today we’re adding something special to Popfly: an early version of our Popfly Game Creator. That’s right: Popfly is about more than mashups and web pages. It’s about making it fun to build things and share them with your friends. And one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that games are the kinds of things that people would like to try to build.

What kinds of games can you create? Just about any kind of two-dimensional game, a category that includes things like the original Super Mario™, Frogger™, Asteroids™, and a host of other old arcade games. To make it easy, Popfly is still focused on getting as much done as possible without having to write any code. The game creator has over 15 pre-built game templates for you to try, hundreds of images, animations, backgrounds, and sounds for you to use in the games you create, and, of course, a way for you to write code if you reach the limits of what the user interface can do for you. Since this is Popfly, you can still save, share, and embed your creations everywhere from your blog to your Facebook page to your Windows Vista Sidebar.

We’re not forgetting mashups either. We revamped the interface for embedding mashups in other web pages, improved performance and caching, updated the Twitter block, and even created a nice World of Warcraft™ mashup that you can add to your Facebook page.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Game Creator

Popfly Team at Maker Faire

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:54:13 GMT

On Saturday May 3 -- that's a week from today -- members of the Popfly team will be at O'Reilly's Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA.

If you remember last year's Maker Faire, we did two things: we debuted Popfly and we set up shop and painted rubber ducks. Both were obviously important -- historic, in fact -- events, so this year we will be showing more new stuff and we'll have more duck painting. So come on by and visit.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Maker Faire, Microsoft

Popfly Nominated for CNET Webware Award

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:08:23 GMT

Popfly has been nominated for the CNET Webware 100 awards – the top 100 coolest online apps! We’ve been selected as one of the 300 finalists by CNET editors. That's a huge accomplishment, but now it’s up to you to decide which services are the Webware 100 winners by voting for your favorites.

As you can imagine, we’re pretty pleased just to be nominated, but we’d be more pleased if we actually won and to do that, we need your help: we need you to vote. They’ve made it pretty simple: just click on this link and you’ll be directed to a page where Popfly is automatically checked. You’re allowed up to three votes per person. Winners are announced on April 21.

There’s a lot of great competition, so please help Popfly win!

Technorati Tags: Popfly, CNET Webware 100 Awards

Happy Valentine's Day

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:23:47 GMT

Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of this day, we are sending you an updated version of Popfly, including two user contributed logos from Jimmy Baw and Shaan Agarwal from Bentley College. If you have an image that’ll make a good logo send it our way (though keep in mind you need to own the copyright on any image you submit to us). You can test out your logo ideas with this handy mashup.

Also in this version:

Data sources, a.k.a. yellow blocks. For everyone who has ever wanted to bring their own data into the mashup creator, we present the data source editor: comma separated values are converted into yellow data source blocks for use in the mashup designer.
Improved search interface. Search for projects and users through the search bar located at the top of most pages. We’ve improved searching in Popfly Explorer as well.
Build a better block. For the block creators out there, you now have the ability to upload images or any other supporting files to your block.
Comments on profile pages. Reach out to other community members through profile page messages.
Better ways to invite friends. We’ve improved the intelligence of the contact list import feature – find your friends who already have Popfly accounts, and invite others to play around with Popfly.
New blocks. MovingSlideshow (smooth panning and zooming transitions) and RSSList (would look great in a blog sidebar).
Help Wiki. Find more tutorials and getting started information at a new location: www.popflywiki.com. Help being relocated to the wiki – for now the team will be updating the wiki, but we’re looking into opening this up to the entire community.
Silverlight support in Popfly Explorer. You can now add Silverlight to your Popfly Web Site.

We’ve also updated the Popfly privacy statement. To see the updated statement, please see the privacy statement link in the footer of the site.

Happy Popfly Year!

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:01:07 GMT

'Twas the day of deployment and all through the house, a few creatures were stirring, mostly our developers. We just deployed our latest build of Popfly and Popfly Explorer, so it's a good time to tell you what to expect:

Popfly Explorer (the plug-in for Visual Studio)

Integrated block creation. You can now create, debug, and publish Popfly blocks directly from Visual Studio. This is a huge advance for our block creators since you can use the powerful Visual Studio JavaScript editor rather than the Popfly block editor. Documentation for that is here.
Block editor IntelliSense in Popfly Explorer. With full IntelliSense for creating the XML and JavaScript, producing a block description is now easier than ever..
Improved search. In the past, Popfly Explorer search is a bit limited; the new search UI makes it easy to find projects of different types created by different people.

Popfly

WSDL block generation. Point Popfly at a WSDL file and it will automatically generate the stub of a block.
Panning. Ever opened a mashup in edit view and the blocks go off the screen? Well you can now scroll left and right. This one was, as you can imagine, a big customer request.
Developer keys in preview. Wonder why your Facebook mashups don't show your friends in preview? So did we, and so we fixed it: Popfly now uses your developer key for any given service if you have one and only use our preview keys when you don't have one.
Mashups mash more smoothly. We’ve improved the parameter matching when you connect blocks.
Block editor preview. Get a quick preview of changes to your block by clicking the Save and Run button within the block editor.
Documentation. We've been a bit remiss in documenting particularly the changes to the block creation experience. Now with the integration into Visual Studio through Popfly Explorer we've updated the documentation. And check out the documentation for advanced mode in the Mashup designer

Oh, and don't miss the live-action Popfly screencast.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Silverlight, mashups, Visual Studio, WSDL

Popfly News: Top 25 Most Innovative Product for 2007

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:12:49 GMT

PC World just announced its list of the top 25 most innovative products for 2007 and Popfly is on it! This is obviously a huge award for the Popfly team -- we've spent a year working long hours to get a pretty non-traditional Microsoft product out the door and awards like this mean a lot to us. There are a lot of people we'd like to thank for their support: Somasegar, our VP for believing us, the editors at PC World for recognizing us, and especially we owe thanks to the people who have been willing to spend the time using Popfly and giving us feedback and asking questions in our forums.

Of course in the minds of a bunch of software developers, there's no better way to say thanks than by adding new features, so here are a few:

Email notifications. If you have a Popfly account you probably got an email from us recently letting you know that we've added a feature so that Popfly will send you email when certain things happen, for example, when someone adds you as a friend.
Advanced Halo 3 Gamer Card. We've created a new block that shows Halo 3 statistics for you and your friends, with special attention to working well on Facebook.
E-Cards. It is the holiday season, and what holiday would be complete without being able to send your friends your mashups as e-cards?

We have a lot more in the pipeline, but if you haven't been back to Popfly in a while, give it a try.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Silverlight, mashups, PC World, Halo 3, E-Cards

Release Notes for November 2007

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:32:08 GMT

Microsoft® Popfly™ Beta Release Notes

Microsoft® Popfly™ is a beta release right now. What that means is when the terms of use talk about the software being provided "as is," we mean it. Most other people only kind of mean it. We really, really mean it. Stuff will break. We’ll just apologize in advance. Sorry.

So what do you need to know? Here are the top things you probably want to know about our site. If you find others, feel free to visit our forums and give us as much information there as possible.

The Basics

You need a Windows Live ID associated with an email address to create a Popfly account. You can get a Live ID at http://login.live.com.
You need IE 6, IE 7, or Firefox 2.0. We support IE 6 and 7 (Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista) and Firefox 2 (Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X).
You need Silverlight™. To use some of our site you’ll need Silverlight™ 1.0 from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/install.aspx.
On Firefox, you may get a message about not being able to verify the identity of the site; it’s a minor certificate problem that we’re fixing very soon.

Popfly Mashup Creator

You may get some strange IntelliSense behavior when you’re using the advanced view.
Some display blocks that use Silverlight can only display images in the PNG and JPEG formats. Other formats, such as GIF, will not be displayed, and you may see an error message.

Popfly Web Editor

We don’t let you type in your own HTML and JavaScript. If you want custom HTML and JavaScript, download Popfly Explorer and use Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express.

Popfly Embedding and Project Handling

Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets are small so some output types (such as Virtual Earth-based mashups) won’t display well.
You can't rename projects. If you need to, open the project, click "save as," then delete the old copy or use Popfly Explorer.

Popfly Explorer

You’ll get an error when you try to open a project that is not supported by the SKU you are currently running Popfly Explorer in – so, for example, you can’t open VB projects in Visual C# Express (which makes sense when you think about it).
Renaming a solution when it’s open will break the association with the version on the web site.

Popfly Explorer Goes Into Beta

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:43:26 GMT

Last month we took the Popfly web site into beta with better gadget support, tweaking support, and some new blocks. This morning at 5AM PST at Tech Ed EMEA Somasegar (our divisional vice president) and Dan Fernandez (our marketing lead) showed off the new version of Popfly Explorer, the Visual Studio extension that enables you to save and share Visual Studio applications on the Popfly web site. Enhancements to Popfly Explorer include:

You can create and host full web pages using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS on Popfly
You can embed Popfly mashups into HTML pages
It works on Visual Web Developer Express
It works on Visual Studio 2008 (beta 2 and later) as well as Visual Studio 2005
Lots of work on the user interface

Click here to download Popfly Explorer.

In addition to improvements to Popfly Explorer the Popfly web site has a few improvements, including:

You can publish gadgets to the Windows Live Gadget Gallery
Improvements to the carousel display block
Updates to the profile editing page

In addition, we've updated the Popfly privacy statement.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Silverlight, Visual Studio, Mashups, Web 2.0

Notes for October Release

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:48:18 GMT

Microsoft® Popfly™ Beta Release Notes

So what do you need to know? Here are the top things you probably want to know about our site. If you find others, feel free to visit our forums and give us as much information there as possible.

The Basics

You need a Windows Live ID associated with an email address to create a Popfly account. You can get a Live ID at http://login.live.com.
You need IE 6, IE 7, or Firefox 2.0. We support IE 6 and 7 (Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista) and Firefox 2 (Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X).
You need Silverlight™. To use some of our site you’ll need Silverlight™ 1.0 from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/install.aspx. Don’t worry, it’s small and we’ll even check if you have it installed for you and give you a link to install it.
On Firefox, you may get a message about not being able to verify the identity of the site; it’s a minor certificate problem that we’re fixing very soon.

Popfly Mashup Creator

You may get some strange IntelliSense behavior in Firefox 2.0.
We’re still working through some Silverlight-on-Mac issues.
If you installed either the December or February WPF/E CTP, you'll need to remove it before installing Silverlight 1.0 .
Display blocks that use Silverlight (such as Carousel or PhotoTiles) can only display images in the PNG and JPEG formats. Other formats, such as GIF, will not be displayed, and you may see an error message.

Popfly Web Editor

We don’t let you type in your own HTML and JavaScript, but you can create a mashup with custom HTML and JavaScript then embed it in the page. If you want custom HTML and JavaScript, you can use the Custom HTML view from the Mashup creator.
It’s a little wonky in Firefox 2.0.

Popfly Space

Our support for Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets is still developing – the sizes of the gadgets in particular will probably come out wrong.
You can't rename projects. If you need to, open the project, click "save as," then delete the old copy.

Popfly Projects

Our support for Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets is still developing – the sizes of the gadgets in particular will probably come out wrong.
You can’t rename projects. If you need to, open the project, click "save as," then delete the old copy.

Popfly Explorer

Popfly Explorer won’t work on Visual Studio 2008. You may be able to install it and it may even pretend to run, but we haven’t tested it.
Popfly Explorer won’t work on Visual Web Developer Express 2005.
You’ll get an error when you try to open a project that is not supported by the SKU you are currently running Popfly Explorer in – so, for example, you can’t open VB projects in Visual C# Express 2005 (which makes sense when you think about it).
Your first login may take a while and you may need to press the sign-in button more than once.
Popfly Explorer enables you to create, save, share, and open Visual Studio® 2005 projects onto the Popfly network. It doesn’t enable you to open Popfly projects (e.g. mashups).
Conversely, you can’t open Visual Studio 2005 projects using Popfly without using Popfly Explorer.
Renaming a solution when it’s open will break the association with the version on the web site.
Yes, you can invite yourself to be your own friend. It’s weird, but self-affirming.

(cross-posted from http://www.popfly.com/Overview/ReleaseNotes.aspx)

Introducing Popfly Beta: Open to All

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:45:04 GMT

Over the last few weeks we’ve added many features and polished the user interface. We’ve taken feedback from our alpha testers, and ironed bugs. We’re not “done,” but we’re certainly feeling good enough about the release to move from calling it alpha to beta.

In fact, we feel good enough about Popfly to remove the invitation-only restriction: as of today, all you need to get into Popfly is a Live ID. More than that, we’ve introduced many features:

Gadgets. Popfly can create both Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets and Windows Live gadgets.
Tweaking and Properties. Last iteration, we added “tweaking,” but many blocks didn’t have a lot of properties to tweak, so we added properties to a host of our output blocks including Photoshow, Virtual Earth, PhotoSphere, Gauge, and Page Turner.
Tweaking and the color picker. When you tweak a mashup you now have a color picker so you don’t have to remember the alphanumeric codes for colors.
New and updated blocks. Popfly has a category for new and updated blocks.
New screencasts. Updated videos explaining how to use Popfly.
New blocks. Notably one we did for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit.
Updated block documentation. Courtesy Andy, our resident block program manager.
Privacy statement. We’ve also slightly modified our Privacy Statement, so check it out.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Web2Summit, Mashups, Silverlight

Changing Popfly’s Silverlight Blocks

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 16:15:46 GMT

One of the fun parts of building on pre-release technologies (as Silverlight 1.0 was when we started Popfly) is that you get little oddities throughout the process. One of these has come in the form of a namespace change: If you have any references to Sys.Silverlight replace them with Silverlight. Even better is to call createSilverlightBlockEx – take a look at the block building guide to see how this works. If you don’t make the changes, you’ll find that your blocks start to throw errors.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Mashup, Update

Facebook fun in Popfly

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:06:09 GMT

Want to know more about how to use the Facebook block and other Facebook-related features in Popfly? Check out some video tutorials we put together: (It's a three part series.)

Part 1: http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=0bb71160-b2e6-4a0c-87c6-800dd17a7609

Part 2: http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=618bb91e-8b8d-4a36-a242-249a474bff4a

Part 3: http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=3a71a5dc-958b-4c71-ac59-f44303f91cce

Hopefully these help you to get started with this popular block and give you some new ways to share your creations. Let us know if you have any other video tutorial requests.

Popfly Update: The White Album

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:03:54 GMT

This morning we deployed the latest version of Popfly to our servers. Here are three cool new features (among many) that you'll find with this release:

Tweaking. Easier than ripping someone else's project, tweaking enables you to change basic properties of that project and save it. For example, if see a great mashup that uses photos of cats, but you want to see dogs, you can now do it without needing to rip the entire project.
Integration with Dapper. Dapper is a tool that transforms web sites into other content types (e.g. RSS feeds or straight XML), so you can now take web sites that may not have associated blocks, create a Dapper "Dapp," then use the Dapp within Popfly. See the Dapper tutorial here.
Embed in Facebook. Before, Popfly would publish a link to your profile page. Now you can embed an entire application.

In addition, you'll see some other nice changes:

A new, cleaner (and faster-loading) user interface
Blocks organized by category
Searching for projects, top projects, and top contributors
The ability to email links to your friends
Block properties so, for example, you can change things such as the frame color
Digg and Reddit buttons

So c'mon back and give Popfly a try!

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Mashups, Dapper, Facebook, Silverlight

Upgrading Silverlight 1.0

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 23:18:04 GMT

Silverlight is growing up! The beta version has now expired, and the release candidate is out. For the smoothest installation experience, we recommend you uninstall the beta before installing the latest version.

Introducing the Popfly Logo

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:59:08 GMT

As you may have noticed, we've changed the Popfly logo from the ducks to something a bit more subtle, but something that opens the door to a lot more creativity. We call them "thought bubbles." The logo consists of the Microsoft Popfly "lockup" with the addition of two circles set at a specific angle.

We wanted to have something that we could change with new imagery and new ideas when the mood struck us. The two circles can be used in myriad ways. You can put just about any image into them. We've tried it with birds, the Popfly ducks, people, street signs, and you've probably already met Attention Dog.

Want to create your own Popfly logo? The coolest thing about the new logo system is that it is open to interpretation by anyone. If you wanted to create your own Popfly logo, you'd just need to follow a few simple rules:

Size and Proportion. The circles must always assume the same size, proportion, and angle position. The icon and the logo may
be used independently of each other but must always
appear on the same visual plane (for example, the same
side of a printed piece).
Clear Space. For consistency, the Popfly
logo should not be placed too tightly against type, other
graphic elements, or page trim. Use the height of the
lowercase “o” in “Popfly” (x-height) as a measurement
unit. Allow a minimum distance of 1 x-height around all
four sides of the logo.
Minimum Size. To establish the minimum size for the Popfly logo, measure the distance from the left side of the “P” in
“Popfly” to the right side of the icon. This distance
should never be less than 1” for print or online.

When you're done, you can email the logo to poplogo at microsoft dot com.

Technorati Tags: Popfly

The Invitations are In

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:56:08 GMT

Many of you have asked about the "Invite a Friend" link that Popfly sports. When you clicked on it, you got the message that you had no invitations remaining.

But today that's changing.

As of today, every Popfly member gets 5 invitations that you can send out to whomever they want. (Yes, whomever. We're pretty sure that's grammatically correct, even if it does sound weird.)

What does it take to send an invitation? Not much. Your invitees do need to have Windows Live IDs for an email account, but that's not a huge deal for most people. It doesn't have to be an @hotmail.com account or an @msn.com account either -- any email address can have a Live ID. If they don't, they're going to need to visit http://login.live.com and create one -- it takes between one and five minutes. They can even create the Live ID after they've received the invitation email.

Here's how to do it:

Step 1:click on the Socialize menu and pick "Invite a Friend."
Step 2: start typing in the email addresses of folks you'd like to invite. (Yes, I have 163 invitations remaining -- I work here. ;-) You can enter one email address per line. When you're done, click the Next button.
Step 3: if you want, enter some personal text for the email invitation. You can also leave it blank. We fill out the basic form for you with the information that the invitee will need. When you're done, click the Next button.
Step 4: preview the result. You get a last chance to see to whom you're sending your invitations (yes, whom again) and any custom text that the invitees will see. If it looks OK, click on "Send the Invitations." In a few moments they should receive an email from your Live ID with a link inviting them into Popfly.

People who join Popfly after today won't get invitations for a while (that is, they will start with 0 invitations and eventually we'll grant them some invitations).

If you have problems, please ask in our forums.

Technorati Tags: Popfly

Meet Attention Dog

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 05:37:06 GMT

I've had about two dozen people ask me who Attention Dog is. He's one of our login page images. He's friendly, doesn't bite, and likes peanut butter.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Attention Dog

Reminder: Popfly Town Hall

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 05:33:34 GMT

Just in case you forgot, we're hosting a virtual town hall meeting tomorrow (Friday) at 10AM PST. Feel free to join us:

Event Title: Microsoft Popfly Townhall
Event Date: Friday, July 27, 2007
Event Time: 10:00 AM PT
Duration: 60 minutes

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/lmevents/join?id=msft072707df&role=attend&pw=ATN973

Or manually:

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/lmevents
Name: (Enter your first and last name)
Meeting ID: msft072707df
Meeting Key: ATN973

Technorati Tags: Popfly

Popfly "Town Hall" Friday

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:02:39 GMT

Please join us for an online Town Hall for Popfly on Friday, July 27, 2007 from 10:00AM – 11:00AM PST. Popfly Town Hall meetings are where we’ll show you new features in Popfly as well as get your feedback on features, answer questions, and generally trying to have a good time. You’ll need to install Microsoft Office Live Meeting client, and after that, click here. You can also join manually by browsing here and entering this information:

- Name: (Enter your first and last name)
- Meeting ID: msft072707df
- Meeting Key: ATN973

See you Friday!

Technorati Tags: Popfly

Popfly Updated

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:15:26 GMT

We have just deployed our latest updates to Popfly, so c'mon back and check it out. This release includes a host of new features, such as:

A new home page so you log in and see a page that’s customized for you with your friend requests, changes your friends have made, and your projects as well as hot projects and news.
Consistent menus so that you don’t have to keep returning to your “My” page to create mashups, blocks, and web pages.
Tagging and long descriptions so you can explain what your project is all about using full sentences and tags, along with a details page for each project.
Descriptions for user-submitted blocks in the block list so you can describe (and understand) what blocks do without loading them.
Tag-based searching for user-submitted blocks in block list.
Commenting so folks can tell you what they really think of your projects.
Input validation to help blocks connect better with each other when data types don’t exactly match.
Publishing to Facebook so you can post a link of your Popfly creation to your Facebook account.
Attention dog so you can... Well, we're not exactly sure what you can do with Attention Dog, but he's there.
Friend removal so you can clean up your friends list in case you decide you don’t like someone.
A “crazy-easy” guide to creating your first mashup so you can get started faster
An MSN Shopping block so you can shop until you drop.
…And you can now see what blocks people used in their mashups from the details page.

Please check it out and let us know what you think on the Popfly Forums.

Technorati Tags: Popfly

Nearly All Popfly Invitations Have Been Sent

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:14:04 GMT

Over the past couple of weeks we've been sending invitations for the folks who requested them. At this point, if you requested an invitation through http://www.popfly.com as of yesterday (June 19) you should have received an invitation. If you requested an invitation and haven't gotten an invitation, you may want to request another invitation.

Here's some of what's going on. Right after you request an invitation Popfly sends you an acknowledgement email from suf at microsoft dot com. We see a lot of these acknowledgement emails bounce back because folks signed up for an invitation using a Windows Live ID that doesn't have an active email address associated with it.

Another thing we're seeing is our invitation email being marked as spam. Popfly invitations come from a human's Hotmail account -- typically email addresses such as zazam at hotmail dot com or abreth at hotmail dot com. Although completely valid email addresses, a lot of people have spam filters turned up pretty strictly and Popfly invitations are being classified as spam.

All of which is to say that, if you want a Popfly invitation you should go to http://www.popfly.com, sign in with a Windows Live ID that can receive email and request one, then look for an email from either zazam or abreth.

It's Alive (the new deployment, that is)

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:41:16 GMT

C'mon back and check out our updates to Popfly. You'll notice a revamped home page, some new blocks like Live Search, Live Spellchecker, Live Ads, and StrawPoll, and a host of performance improvements. We've also transcoded our videos to use Silverlight Streaming, so they'll load a lot faster.

Block suggestions to help you build your mashups
Significant performance improvements
- Loading the mashup designer is enormously faster in IE, but it’s also faster in Firefox as well
- Saving mashups should now be a bit faster (for all browsers)
- Mashups that hang should now be the exception rather than the rule
- Loading avatars in search results should be much faster (for all browsers)
Mashups that you’d actually want to embed in your blog!
- The Silverlight install page no longer hijacks control of the page
- Almost every display block centers & sizes appropriately
- Avoidance of “white-on-white” text situations
100% more hot mashups!
You can see when every member joined Popfly
John’s head is no longer smooshed, as aspect ratio of avatars is honored (at least in the search results)
Slick inline UI for adding a dev key (no more popup blocker madness)
You can now click someone’s block from their project page to instantly use it in a mashup
A more obvious way to “cancel” your block search
More tooltips
More cowbell
Integrated news from the Popfly team
Preview-time console to help power-users debug
Live Ads, Live Image Search, Live News, Live Search, Live Spellchecker, Phonebook, Bar Graph, PhotoShow, Straw Poll, …
Tons of misc. bug fixes

Preparing for Deployment

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:48:30 GMT

This week we'll be pushing our latest software to our production servers. You may not notice too many changes on the outside, but you should see performance improvements and a few other tweaks to usability, like blocks that can suggest blocks that they may mash well with.

Please stay tuned as we run through our final tests.

Getting Help

Thu, 17 May 2007 17:51:51 GMT

If you have questions, comments, or ideas, we have a set of forums that we've set up on MSDN. If you have questions or comment or need help with Popfly, please go there and ask. Our team is pretty active.

Adding a Popfly Creation to Windows Live Spaces

Thu, 17 May 2007 17:49:54 GMT

In Popfly, just save a project, then share it, then click on the "Add to Windows Live Spaces" link.

To make this work for your account, you need to be logged in to both Popfly and Windows Live Spaces at the same time with the same account.