This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Feb 2008, by bart_pisha.
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11 Feb 08
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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.
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new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.
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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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“This is not just a passive experience,
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Popfly, he said, is for “the 21- to 27-year-old crowd who grew up on the Web.”
“They have never known a world without eBay, Amazon, or Google,” he added. “They assume that when you create a piece of software it will be Internet-connected and it will have an innate sense of who your friends are.”
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Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., where the computer scientist Mark Frydenberg is using Popfly to teach his students how to interact with digital data in new ways.
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IF Popfly can become that kind of a tool widely used on the Web, it will be an important quiver in the strategy that was started in 2005 by Ray Ozzie, who is now Microsoft’s chief software architect.
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For his part, Mr. Montgomery believes that Popfly does have some very big ideas to offer the Web world. He is following in an important tradition that began in the 1960s with computer languages like Logo and Smalltalk, which were aimed at unlocking the power of computing for nontechnical users. Today he is betting that Popfly will offer a simple way to give the power of programming to the rest of us.
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10 Feb 08
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