Finally, some cool apps based on Silverlight have started to appear. Well, relatively: Microsoft’s Popfly, which seems to be a very interesting mashup/website creator, is still in invite-only beta and invites are really hard to come by. AOL’s Social Mail, a Vista-only gadget (widget), is available for download, but it is a preview release, while the full release is coming mid-May.

AOL Social Mail is a nice gizmo for quick access to AOL’s IM and e-mail, together with something called A-List: a list of your most often used contacts, which will enable you to quickly send them messages, photos and videos.

Microsoft’s Popfly, on the other hand, seems to be a really interesting application. It will enable users to create mashups of various services within a visual interface - similar to Yahoo! Pipes. However, it will also have simple website design capabilities with the ability to customize your HTML code by hand, and embed the mashups you’ve created on the page.

While Yahoo! Pipes proved that visual mashup-making is very possible (check the 5 Yahoo! Pipes we’ve created earlier), I’m very skeptical about online webdesign, as it reminds of the horrid GeoCities tools which were quite useless if you wanted to create, well, something good. It’s a bold idea by Microsoft, and it will certainly be an interesting one to try out.

*Oh yeah, and Microsoft just coughed up 6 billion dollars for an ad network company called aQuantive. Details here.

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