I was reading a bit today about Popfly….

Who is Popfly:

The Non-Professional tools team builds software to enable new, hobbyist, and other non-professional programmers - as well as complete non-programmers - to build and share their work. Our team’s vision is to democratize development by making it approachable to an entire class of people that want to "create" without necessarily having to write code. We believe that if you can send an email, you should be able to build and personalize your own website, mashup, social networking site, or blog.

I need to play with this a bit more before I comment on its coolness as a community / social networking / Mashup for non-pro developers.  Those who read my site regularly will know that the notion of "democratization" is a key principle for me around community development.

But, what actually caught my eye was more to the notion of corporate transparency - in particular I’ve blogged here before about how new media enables a different kind of "corporate voice" to emerge than expected - one that is a bit more authentic.  The specific example that I liked was here in the FAQ:

Why did you call it Popfly?

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

This is beautiful!!  Nicely done.  Never hesitate to show a bit of personality and poke fun at yourselves a bit - this is just plain good web 2.0 authenticity.

Learn more about Popfly on Channel9.

Oh, and speaking of Channel 9…another great example of the unexpected, authentic voice is here in the ReadMe.txt:

Channel 9 Doctrine #8:  Don’t be a jerk. Nobody likes mean people.

This is not the language, tone and manner that users expected on corporate web sites….this unexpectedness is what makes it great and honest.

Sean

 

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