Microsoft opens beta version of Popfly mashup designer

Microsoft yesterday in San Francisco announced the start of an open beta test of its Popfly mashup service, which is targeted at regular users.

Popfly is a web application that allows people to build mashups (applications that use different services), web pages and gadgets by dragging and connecting different components, “blocks”, which eliminates the need to write code. Popfly is based on Microsoft Silverlight technology.
In May, when Microsoft showed Popfly's alpha version , the service had pre-installed “blocks” for popular websites Flickr and MySpace. Now the service is integrated with Facebook, and users can run gadgets that can run on Windows Vista or Windows Live.

This is not the first service of this kind. In addition to Popfly, there are services for writing mashups of Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes.