Yep... is it just me or does everything on TechCrunch get glowing reviews? Apollo, Yahoo Pipes, Silverlight, and now Popfly... Arrington touts them all as the best thing ever.
Here's what I do: just scan the headlines on TC and go to the sites he links to and make your own opinion about things. Arrington and Duncan don't know what they're talking about and they just regurgitate the PR they're fed. Discount everything Arrington says... he's not a techie (he's a lawyer). TC was cool long time ago when there were no alternatives but these days, it's downright awful and there are a ton of better sites.
I switched to GigaOM as my primary news source and Om Malik is a lot more objective and he actually has a bullshit filter. It's tough to influence him since he's actually a real journalist. And he's also a friend of YC ;).
1) Perhaps he reviews stuff he likes. 2) There's a lot of incentive to say things are great in case they take off and you're looking for advertisers, connections, exclusive news, etc. Big companies like Yahoo and Microsoft are going to be around for a while and I don't think Arrington is interested in burning any bridges with them.
TechCrunch is more of a news site than a site for critical analysis. I think it's nice to give every website the benefit of the doubt, that everything will be fixed soon enough.
I know there are a lot of MS detractors here, I still have to say that this software looks like it's for real. I was able to create an address book mash up in 15 minutes. From zero knowledge of what PopFly was, to maps with Flickr photos in them in minutes. I believe a lot of the "ideas" guys out there, who don't have a lot of programming expertise would be well advised to take a look at this. Couple it with Microsoft's hosting and you can probably make compelling sites with little tech expertise. That is, you can make sites as compelling as a lot of the Web 2.0 stuff you see out there, with little tech expertise. Ask.com would be a challenge to build with this, YouTube would be a cinch.
You know it is occurring to me as I write this post that we first saw the value of consumer software trend toward zero cost with open source. Then we saw the value of consumer content trending towards zero cost with Napster and later YouTube. I wonder if things like PopFly will make even the value of offering consumer services trend towards zero cost. I am hard pressed to believe that we all can survive on web advertising with 100 other "little guys" doing the exact same thing, only with Microsoft shunting the pure user to their web sites.
So if we can charge for very little of this what is left? I guess the model of grabbing the largest audience possible and selling it to Google or Yahoo doesn't look so bad after all.
I suppose it makes sense for their first Silverlight project to be focused towards techies because they would be the most likely to install Silverlight.
