San Dimas Beta Invitations Going Out... Now!

I'm pleased to announce that the beta program for the eBay "San Dimas" project has begun! If you signed up for eBay San Dimas in the first couple days after we opened sign-ups (in April), you should have an invitation sitting in your inbox. I'm also knee-deep trying to figure out how to get invitations out to everyone who was at eBay DevCon - I know that there are some users who have got them and some who have, but it is a manual task that I haven't yet figured out how to automate. Poor me :-) Here is a screenshot of the build we are sending out:

I got to show San Dimas in the keynote on Monday, and thankfully it went off without a hitch. Doing live demos on real production data with a beta product running on a beta platform is a recipe for disaster, but I wanted to risk it and show everyone the product. Thanks to everyone for the compliments, and thank you to everyone who came to my "Desktop 2.0" session later on. Also thank you to the beta users (including beta user number 1 -- you know who you are) who have sent in lots of great suggestions (and plenty of bug reports) already. We are working hard on fixing the highest priority bugs, and will push out a new build by the end of the week.

One of the points I made in my session, and that I want to re-emphasize here, is that I would love for San Dimas to become a platform that third-party developers can "plug-in" to. I'll stress that this may not happen - and if it does it is a long way off. Having said that, I had great conversations with developers in Boston about things that they would like to do with an eBay desktop application, if they had the ability to extend it or integrate with it.

We are busy enough working on the first version of the product, so we haven't sat down to think through what we need in the technology for allowing third parties to extend San Dimas, but now is the right time to talk to developers, so that anything we do allows developers to create things they have told us would be useful, not just what we think they should do with it. I want to continue that conversation on this blog and elsewhere. During the day 3 keynote, Pierre said that third party developers are a crucial engine of innovation, and I agree with him 100%.

So, developers, if San Dimas were a platform, what would you do with it?

Comments

[Abdul Qabiz]

> So, developers, if San
> Dimas were a platform, what
> would you do with it?

I would think of putting up different widgets in it. For example: Running a mixercast inside it.. May be hooking it with other stuff (IM, email etc)..