Microsoft, Mash-ups and Popfly
I’m sure it wasn’t long ago that a ‘mash-up’ was a seamless mix of two existing songs, but these days it seems to be taking on a different meaning in web design.
The name of the game, it seems, is taking elements from all those wonderful web-sites we belong to now, and mixing them together in some sort of portal/web-application.
Hmm… my latest flickr pictures and blog entries together with facebook information on a home page I’ve been meaning to write… Could be good, if it’s done right.
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s a useless fad or the next stage of web evolution. But Microsoft has jumped onto the bandwagon with Popfly.
Lots of people see me as some sort of ‘Mac geek’ (despite the fact that 95% of all my computing happens on a windows PC (for the moment)). Others are struck by my linux advocacy for servers. The truth is I don’t feel I’m particularly anti-Microsoft or pro-apple/linux. All of the current OS options out there grind my gears at some point or another, and all I want is to get the best of all possible worlds. But I do have some ‘automatic reservations’ about products from any software house based on previous experience, so I’m going to list a couple of MS-centric ones:
Microsoft have traditionally followed very closed-source development philosophies. When I say that, I’m not talking about the fact that their software is closed source, or that they charge too much for it: I really don’t think that they’re doing anything there that isn’t their right to do. The problem is that it extends to proprietary file formats and communication protocols and the like. And MS aren’t alone in this: real player, AOL Instant messanger, the list goes on.
One of the reasons I like how apple and google have changed in the last decade is that they will embrace open standards, even though their software is closed source. It means it’s easier to move data around different platforms, different clients… and rather than losing business, it seems to increase their market share. I think that this attitude will prove to be more successful in the long run.
So I’m a little cautious about popfly from MS - and also a little surprised, in a good way. I’m hoping that it will be a little gleam of Microsoft’s past glories - not a big invention, but a piece of useful innovation.