Microsoft's announcement today that they're shutting down their Popfly Mashup tool, combined with the imminent shutdown of Google's Mashup Editor are a shame since they were both initiatives which aimed to make it easier for people to create data driven applications. While it looks like a setback for the API / Mashup ecosystem on the surface I think it's positive that these initiatives were launched in the first place - it's incredibly difficult to build powerful tools like this for a non-programmer audience. I guess the conclusion for now is "too hard".
In Google's case, the replacement for the mashup editor is AppEngine - which is really effectively a fully fledged programming environment. In Microsoft's the shutdown announcement points to a number of Web programming products. For the time being this probably makes sense in a larger trend to make mashup tools more powerful (check out YQL v's Yahoo Pipes for example or new developments at Zembly). This allow developers to create richer applications first and I fuly expect that in a year or two well come back full circle to services which make it easier for end users to do powerful things with data, it just takes a few more iterations to mature the right feature set.
The mashup ecosystem is also in robust shape with new mashups getting listed on programmableweb every week. The number of APIs is also still growing rapidly with companies extracting significant value (check out Deepdyve's widget API which launched with 3scale a couple of weeks back) and is already seeing plenty of integrations.
So it's a shame to see some of the bigger names drop initiatives but they'll likely be back in the game sooner or later. In the meantime there are plenty of other sources of mashups to generate new applications (my favorite this week - Swiss trains for what's possible with Google maps and some of realtime data).
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