Easily get maps on Facebook with Popfly

Some time ago, I blogged about creating a Microsoft Virtual Earth map with a geo-enabled Yahoo! Pipes feed.

As an example, I fed a plain RSS feed from IMDb (actors' and directors' birth places) into Pipes, geo-enabled it, and then used the JSON output to programmatically draw push-pins onto a Virtual Earth map (with JavaScript).

Today, I wanted to see how much effort it'd take to do the same thing with Microsoft Popfly. Popfly is an online mashup editor, like the Google Mashup Editor. It uses Silverlight technology.

Well, it was almost effortless. I just needed to drag two blocks onto my new Popfly mashup - one for my Pipes RSS, and the other to draw the Virtual Earth map - connect them and that was it. No programming so far, but if I needed, I could add custom HTML and JavaScript (methinks).



Clicking on preview:



Wow. It's amazing, I know. But wait, there's more. After saving my new mashup, I can use the MashOut function to export my mashup.



Selecting "Share on Facebook" will pop up this dialog which let's you post the mashup to your Facebook profile.



It's so easy.

There's so much in Popfly, that this being the tip of the iceberg is really an understatement. There are many official Microsoft blocks for you to build with. There are also many more custom user contributed blocks that you can use, sort of like cloning someone else's Yahoo! Pipes for yourself. In fact, the Virtual Earth block I used in this example is a custom block contributed by user cschrock.

There is even a Facebook block, and the Popfly team site has videos on using it (and I believe the examples in the videos use maps). Do check them out.

Other posts about mapping:
Open source mapping with OpenLayers and OpenStreetMap