Vinny Lingham posts about his experiences with eBay’s new San Dimas project, which is still in private beta.  Basically, San Dimas is eBay’s attempt to create an offline/online tool on top of Adobe Apollo Air, and allows for eBay users to browse the auction site outside of the browser (”Rich Desktop Application”).

San Dimas looks very interesting, and I was thankful for the screenshots.  But, the thing that caught my eye the most came at the end of his post when Vinny throws in a very insightful (and head spinning) comment…

Hats off to eBay for pushing the envelope here and getting straight onto the Desktop! This will also help them steer customers away from searching Google and having to pay on a PPC basis…how long until the rest of the marketers out there catch on?

With Adobe continuing to push the development of Apollo Air and Microsoft getting into the game with Silverlight, could Rich Desktop Applications be an alternative route for companies to travel instead of staying on the Google traffic freeway?

What could this mean for search marketing and affiliate marketing?

What role with the iPhone play in all of this?

Reminds me of Tara Hunt’s post about the death of the browser from last year…