Use case for Flex Data Services

I have been working on an interesting use case for Flex and Flex Data Services, that will build nicely into the recently announced Apollo runtime.

More and more products are focusing on in-product messaging, a pipeline for updates, upsells, upsets, uplevels, etc built into the product interface and then pumped full of sometimes useful, sometimes necessary and sometimes not - clickable marketing matter.

Assuming it is only a matter of time until this approach matures completely and usefulness is part of the usability, it seems to me that what we ultimately need is some way of pumping a series of messages, samples, updates, patches, etc into a local object that can be accessed by users in different ways, whether they are online or offline...hmmm

Given the richness of the Flash interface, the ability to build nice transitions and states into applications or widgets within applications, and the horsepower delivered by FDS to get all that data streaming out to the applications, whether or not it is being viewed in real time and the general productivity of the programming paradigm would position Flex well for stuff like this.

I know I should stop coming up with ideas that Adobe is not interested in focusing on - I had that same problem when I worked there, right DM? ;-) But it seems to me that this is a viable use case, and one that I am going to explore further for some future projects I see coming my way.