Not wanting to be left behind in the Web 2.1 race, The Bill Gates Armageddon Machine Microsoft has a unique different web mashup utility up, Popfly.

Any similarity between this and what they think Raph is doing over at Metaplace is entirely non-coincidental, not to mention entirely incorrect.

Metaplace is striving to make interactive social applications accessible to everyone (both in terms of creation and end-user), while Popfly is…well, Popfly is trying to become the hot new Facebook app, apparently.

Popfly allows you to create basic games using their new Game Creator (which is in Alpha at the moment), but since I haven’t had time to sit down with it for very long, I don’t have an example game using night elf porn…stay tuned, though, because it’ll happen sooner or later; it’s an idea whose time has come. However, not wanting to sell it short with no example, here’s a version of Frogger that someone put together, and just in case anyone thinks I tried to find a bad example, this one is on the “Top Rated Projects” tab with five stars out of five:

Admittedly, Game Creator is in Alpha, and as a result no one’s really had time to grab it and shake a good project out of it…however, that’s…ummmm…well, it’s….errrrr….okay, moving on.

MicroFlaccid has several other things built into Popfly, including an internet “mashup” utility. Not having the time to delve into the Game Creator, I did manage to create a very basic photo mashup, using the search term “night elf porn”, because once I grab hold of an idea I don’t easily let it go:

Notice, by the way, the interesting images that come up as a result of that search. I would be willing to bet there are retired ornithologists that are aghast at the pictures of bare breasts their Facebook page is now displaying because they created a Popfly mashup using the search term “my pet titmouse“.

But back to the gaming…without delving into coding, the functionality of Popfly’s Game Creator seems to be limited to allowing you to recreate ’80’s arcade games with new graphics, all while mixing and matching various actions, images and events.

In my mind, using Game Creator makes you a “game designer” like putting together a Lego set makes you a “building contractor”. The basic tools are there, sure…but it’s the most basic form of “basic” I can imagine, and the user interface (again, going from a very brief first glance) appears to be a bit convoluted for allowing non-coders to create a game.

Microsoft seems to be a bit behind the curve on this one, which might explain the name…in baseball, a popfly is usually an easy out.

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Tags: games, gaming, Metaplace, Microsoft, mmo, mmorpg, Popfly