Apollo & eBay

Apollo has been on my mind lately because I can start to see the real advantage of having an RIA sitting in your system tray with all the hooks to the operating system that Flash player just doesn’t allow. Here is a snippet from a recent ZDNet article on eBay’s plan to move their services to Apollo:

How eBay is developing with Adobe’s Apollo project by ZDNet‘s Ryan Stewart — I’ve been very impressed with how forward thinking eBay is. They seem to have lost some of the “street cred” that the other big internet companies get, but they realize how valuable Rich Internet Applications can be and they have been working with Adobe’s Apollo project to explore what RIAs can do for their users. The result is the “San Dimas” project, an RIA that uses eBay’s open APIs to give buyers and sellers additional features that aren’t available on the website.

In the same article, Ryan Stewart he states that “As far as I know, eBay is the only large company that has looked into Apollo.” This statement is true for the moment, but the company I work for also has plans to develop in Apollo. Now, if I can just get my hands on the Apollo. I think if big name companies get some initial offerings into Apollo, even if they are beta offerings, Apollo will have some real traction (not like Central). So, Adobe, if you are reading this, please send me Apollo already!