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Ismail Elshareef
Los Angeles, CA
Geek. Visionary. Avid Reader. Thinker. Entrepreneur. Photographer. Aficionado of the The Arts, Fascinated by Culture.
Interests: Too many to list!
Recent Activity
Steve Jobs: 56 Years of Genius End Today
Posted Oct 5, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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The Business Case for HTML5
Several weeks back, I gave this presentation at the HTML5 Los Angeles meetup group. A couple of days back, I was humbled to see it featured on SlideShare. There's plenty of talks about the technical aspects of HTML5 but not much about its business value. This presentation sheds light on... Continue reading
Posted Oct 3, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
Posted Sep 30, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Global Entry and Skipping Passport Control Lines
Posted Aug 20, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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The Devil in The White City by Erik Larson
Posted Jul 16, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Google+: A Full-Court Press on Facebook - Tom Taulli - Finance Corner - Forbes
Lyle Fong, the CEO and Co-Founder of Lithium: “Active Facebook users at some point face a conundrum – either they don’t accept friend requests from all of their coworkers, acquaintances and distant family members and risk being viewed as elitist, or they accept all requests to be nice, but then... Continue reading
Reblogged Jul 14, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Illustration: Google+ and The "Actionable" Social Web
Posted Jul 8, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Can Google+ Be The "Actionable," Relevant Social Network? You Bet!
Posted Jun 30, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Foreigners Attending US Grad Schools Way Down: Wake Up, Xenophobes
Oh no. This is not good. Will America still lead if it continues to stem the flow of raw, ambitious and hungry foreign talent? The answer is NO. What's really sad is that instead of stopping the illegal, poor masses flooding this country every day, setting us back culturally and... Continue reading
Posted Jun 23, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Why is HTML Suddenly Interesting? - O'Reilly Radar
Native mobile applications will soon become a fad and the tried and tested Web will prevail. The rapidly maturing HTML5 coupled with Google's Latitude will dominate eventually. Web developers couldn't stop talking about HTML and its evolution during the 1990s. New features were usually tempting, though not always workable, and... Continue reading
Posted Jun 23, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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The 15th Anniversary of D'EUX
Posted Jun 23, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Kindle 3 by Amazon
Posted Jun 22, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915
Posted Jun 22, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Thanks, Matt.
The app we created simply asked for permission to access the user's stream and status (read_stream, user_status respectively.) https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions/
The problem with that was that we had to basically interpret each content item in the stream to figure out if it was related to automotive. That wasn't easy since the link object that's exposed through the Open Graph doesn't give you much.
That's why Howard and I started thinking about the best way to do this and we reached the conclusion that only a restructuring of the data will resolve this issue. Also, it seems like a the next logical thing to happen considering the push for structured data by Google.
Facebook has a golden opportunity to truly be the ultimate destination on the web. If I can transact on Facebook, why would I leave it?!
This won't hurt the other companies that partner with Facebook. On the contrary, it will boost their conversions and help the business grow.
The idea of bringing traffic to your site is dying fast. The future is to be part of an ecosystem that works, and today that ecosystem is Facebook.
Power up your APIs and join forces with them. At the end of the day, it's the user experience that'll matter.
Are you into machine learning these days? Have you spoken to Paddy about it? He's been looking into it too.
Good to hear from you, man :-)
Cheers,
Ismail
Relevancy and The Future of User Experience on Facebook
Last summer, I had a friend over for dinner. When he got to my house, he pulled into the driveway in a brand new Lexus GS 450 Hybrid. I congratulated him on his new purchase and told him that I was looking to lease the same car next year when my current lease was due. He had no idea. My respon...
Relevancy and The Future of User Experience on Facebook
Posted Jun 18, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Jun 17, 2011
The Inspire Conference: Themes, Takeaways and Why I Care
Posted Jun 10, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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Hi Thad,
Thanks for the feedback.
You are absolutely correct. The solution we devised worked great for us precisely because we "only" use doubleclick ads. We haven't had the chance to look into the other ad networks to see how they fare on this system, but would love to collaborate on that.
I like your alternative solution and I think it's cleaner. I'll give it a whirl :-)
Thanks again for the feedback!
Cheers,
Ismail
Google Tech Talk: How Edmunds Reduced Page Load Time by 80%!
I was invited to speak at Google on some of the work I've done at Edmunds. The crowd was engaged and the questions were great. It's very humbling to be surrounded by really smart people that like what you do. Update Feb 13, 2011: Great feedback on the YouTube page. Please join in the conversati...
The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing by Lisa Gansky
Posted Mar 31, 2011 at Ismail Elshareef's Blog
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I'm so bummed I missed that keynote. I'll check the infoQ site for the video later.
You said, "if the idea is not working don't agonize over it, kill it and move on." I've always found it difficult to determine whether the idea itself is not working or some aspects of it aren't. Is it the idea itself or how I'm prototyping it that's not working? Is it the idea itself that's not working or is it just outside what Steven Johnson calls the "adjacent possible"? Is it not working now but could be working 5 or 10 years from now?
How do you distinguish "good" ideas that aren't possible today for reasons A, B, and C from downright bad ideas? What do we look for to help us make that distinction?
Apple was experimenting with what eventually became the iPhone for 6 years before the product first hit the market. I'm pretty sure the idea in its first iterations wasn't really working but they continued iterating over it and now we have what some might argue to be an "indispensable" product. What made Apple continue its efforts and not toss the whole thing out?
I'm not really sure there is a clear answer to this, but it might be worthwhile to compile a list of "signs that your idea sucks" to allow people to identify the telltale signs of really bad ideas that just won't work. Ever.
What I learned about Pretotyping
Patrick Copeland from Google gave a facinating talk about a concept called Pretotyping (or Pretend-o-typing). His talk dovetailed nicely into the conversations we've had at work about design thinking and illustrated in a powerful way how to use design thinking to push you towards making the righ...
Maybe another way of thinking about is asking the following question: what are the unacceptable outcomes when a service request times out or fails? Maybe by clearly identifying what we "don't" want to happen we can find out what the best solution is.
What I learned about Software Design
Lesson 1 - Run your services as a remote service from the service client. The biggest thing I learned was that it seems everyone has pulled their service implementations out of their applications and into separate proceses. We have, traditionally, always been nervous about doing this as we have ...
Great roundup!
I agree that Lesson 1 (run your services as a remote service from the service client) was a big revelation, considering how unintuitive it was. Also, Lesson 5 (caching) could address any performance implications that might arise from implementing remote services. So in a way, the drawback to Lesson 1 is taken care of by Lesson 5.
Randy Shoup of eBay made a statement in one of his presentations that I thought was very interesting. He said, "the consumer needs to be able to recover when its dependencies are down." If an application (i.e. consumer) is using a remote service, how could it recover gracefully when that service is down? Could a local cache at the consumer layer be an effective failover mechanism, especially for read-only service calls? Should it just stop working and notify the user that an error has occurred?
These are some of the questions we'll have to tackle as we open up our platform next year. The fact that we expect 3rd-party developers to use our services in a way answers your question about how much visibility the developer needs to have into the architecture of our services. I think that answer is: none. All the developer needs to care about is what methods to call and what data is returning and in what format. The fun details should be hidden, I think.
What I learned about Software Design
Lesson 1 - Run your services as a remote service from the service client. The biggest thing I learned was that it seems everyone has pulled their service implementations out of their applications and into separate proceses. We have, traditionally, always been nervous about doing this as we have ...
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