Microsoft has announced the alpha version of Popfly, its new application creation, mashup enabling tool and social networking software for nonprogrammers.

Popfly consists of two parts: Popfly Creator, which is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups; and Popfly Space, which is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

"There's an obvious desire or need for people to want to create online applications, but it's too difficult today. So our goal is to democratize development," said Dan Fernandez, Microsoft's lead project manager for Visual Studio Express, of the Popfly project.

In an interview with eWEEK last month, S. "Soma" Somasegar, Microsoft's corporate vice president for developer tools, said what is now known as Popfly is Microsoft's attempt to tap the "MySpace generation."

Both Visual Studio Express and Popfly are free technologies from Microsoft. While Microsoft's Visual Studio Express tool is for people who want to and, in fact, must learn to code to use the product, Popfly requires no prior knowledge of programming.

Instead, Popfly is based on the concept of "Blocks," akin to Lego blocks, which users can snap together to create applications and build Web sites to share with others, Fernandez said.

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Edit (Spy):  Check out http://www.popfly.com
Edit (Trombonez): Check out video here.