Among the changes from the he alpha release include one feature that shouldn’t exactly prove a shock: integration with Facebook, the popular Web 2.0 social site for which Microsoft has just made a sizable investment. Specifically, you can spiff up your Facebook profile, blog, or personal web page by adding games, slideshows, your eBay auctions, and not surprisingly, your Halo 3 stats.
The beta also adds the ability to create Windows Vista Sidebar and Windows Live gadgets, which are also currently in beta. Mini applications that you can use to populate a mashup, examples of Microsoft gadgets ranger from Microsoft Outlook task lists to links to online encyclopedia site, provide news headline streams, calculators, game links, and so on.
Finally, the user interface for Popfly has also, not surprisingly, been refined from the alpha release. The main improvement is that it is now simpler to modify somebody else’s mashup.
Silverlight, which was officially released in 1.0 version a month ago, has so far drawn 50 partners. It is now available in 10 languages.
