1. Google Gears—heralded as a step toward the browser as a desktop

9. Facebook API—duh.

17. Zoho Notebook—compiles all kinds of information and enables you to share it

18. Radiohead’s In Rainbows—check out our our coverage of In Rainbows if you missed this ongoing story

20. Mint.com—brings all your personal finance information together, from bank accounts to credit cards

21. Microsoft Popfly—hailed as better than Yahoo Pipes, Popfly is the best masherupper around.

23. Ask.com—commended for Ask3D and AskEraser

The PC World story has met mixed reviews. At this writing, the “Recommend this story?” vote was almost exactly 50/50. What do you think? What did they miss?

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The monolith has touched the Web 2.0 crowd. No less an embodiment of Microsoft’s dominant business than CEO Steve Ballmer will chat with John Battelle at the keynote for the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, to chat about Popfly and other Microsoft technologies.

Ballmer will tout Popfly as a power to the masses type of technology. People will be able to build web pages, or content like gadgets and mashups to plug into existing social networking profiles, blogs, or websites.

Added content could include games, eBay auctions, or photo slide shows. A web page could be a mashup of schedules, maps, and rich media content from a soccer team’s games, with the components built as Popfly applications.

"Microsoft is committed to supporting new business models on the Internet, and has an exciting – and growing – portfolio of Web technologies that is helping to catalyze the growth of Web innovation,” Ballmer said in a pre-keynote statement.

"This is an incredible time for developers, designers, advertisers, marketers and consumers to plug into and take advantage of the opportunities to experience and grow businesses on the Web," he continued.

Leading edge Web 2.0 properties like Facebook and Twitter plan to help their partner, Microsoft, promote Popfly.

But the Popfly team really did the best job of promoting it, by tweaking Microsoft’s legendary reputation for mile-long, bland as oatmeal product names:

Q Why did you call it Popfly?

A Well, left to our own devices we would have called it "Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, October 2007 Community Tech Preview Internets Edition," but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.

Popfly will require Microsoft’s Silverlight, which runs on Windows XP SP2 and on Vista.

It supports Internet Explorer 6.0+ and Firefox 2.0.

The free public beta allows storage of up to 25MB for the creations of Popfly users.

How about you? Have you tried any of the new RSS Mashup Editors? What do you think of them?

On Thursday I was talking with Mark Lucovsky at Google and he was explaining why Google’s Mashup Editor doesn’t yet have the flashy UI that PopFly has. He reminded me of my experience with FrontPage and how that frustrated me everytime I hit a limitation of its editor. I’d drop into HTML, try to change things, and then the code would change or I’d be frustrated because it wouldn’t let me do what I wanted. Lucovsky says that’s why the Google Mashup Editor team hasn’t done a flashy UI yet. It’s the philosophy of the Google teams: to make sure you’ll always be able to do what you want to do and then put the purty UI onto it later to make it easier to use.

Sounds interesting, but wonder what the real devs who are playing with these tools are thinking? Of course I can already hear what Lucovsky is thinking: what are the new devs who are 14 to 20 thinking?

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When I first saw this demoed a few months ago the Microsoftie who showed it to me literally built TwitterVision in two minutes right in front of me without writing code. TwitterVision’s inventor told me he took four hours to do the same thing. Lets someone who isn’t a coder (like me) mashup various Web services easily and quickly.

This is a “small” thing from Microsoft. It isn’t going to get professional developers hot and bothered (at least I don’t think) but it is another piece of a Web strategy. If Microsoft released 10 small things like this then we’d start thinking that they “get” the Web again. What do you think?

Oh, and don’t think it’s just for TwitterVision clones, either. It’ll be interesting to see what people do with this. Start with the Overview page to see what it does.

This was the “small” thing I expected Microsoft to release at Mix.

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