Yonkly: Open Source May Do It Better
by
on April 12, 2008,
Meet Emad Ibrahim. He's a software architect. He quit his job last month to start his own company.
I found his blog via Hacker News, and started following, mainly because I am fascinated by anyone quitting a job to start a company. I personally can't imagine having the money to live on, much less the courage, to do it.
I figured maybe this time next year there would be an announcement of a demo of something. Possibly an invite-only alpha I could jump into. There was no unifying idea presented that struck me, just my interest in someone starting their own company and posting about code things.
So you can imagine how shocked I was to check my feeds today to find Yonkly. Yes, it's definitely at its very beginning stages, but Yonkly is an Open Source Twitter clone. And I'm sure everyone is rolling their eyes, but after one week of coding it, it's up, running, and has plans to incorporate Twitter functionality as well as Facebook statuses.
Still not impressed? What if I said it's already incorporated one of the most-requested features for Twitter: threaded messages?
While an entire Internet economy has been built on the back of Twitter, at the same time, it hasn't been monetized, and development has been slow. This past week saw oohs and aahs over changes in the web app, but the majority of it was moving links around, and adding style points. Why, this far into it, are developers still having to limit API calls because of scalability issues?
Emad Ibrahim may have come up with a much better solution; if there isn't any good way to monetize it, release it as Open Source and let the community fix the problems themselves. As some of the commenters pointed out when I asked if Web 2.0 had any original ideas left, often a clone is a response to unsolved issues and features that never seem to get added. Remove the idea that you are going to get rich and sell your app to Google for hundreds of millions of dollars, and you might get around to solving a problem.
If he could figure all that out and then code it less than a month after quitting his job, I'm betting that Emad Ibrahim is going to have a company to watch.
Update Thank you to the commenter who pointed out I had mistaken Emad Ibrahim's gender all along, most likely due to the picture posted on the job quitting entry. I started following the blog mainly because I was fascinated by the idea of a woman quitting her job to start a company up (which obviously isn't the case), but having seen what's been done in a short period of time, as well as pushing it Open Source, I'll be following the developer as well as the app. My apologies on the gender confusion!
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Thanks for noticing that I am a “he” and not a “she”. Trust me, it’s a good thing. I wouldn’t make a very good looking “she” :)…
I appreciate your post and hope to grow yonkly into a cool website… Like you mentioned this is only one worth of work on top of a framework that is still in beta - so I got ways to go…
-Emad
http://www.emadibrahim.com
Emad, again, I am SO SORRY. I am a little bit disappointed you aren’t a “she” because we need more women in tech, but I still think Yonkly is cool. I love watching these fast ramp-ups, and even more, love Open Source solutions.
Did anyone really think Twitter was hard to copy? Any halfway decent programmer could do it in a couple weeks. Nobody’s done it till now because, well, why bother? There’s really no monetary value to it as a service, as Twitter and now an open source version have proven.
The problem with an open source version is that it doesn’t solve the problem with Twitter. Twitter’s development costs at this point have to be dwarfed by their hosting costs, as will be this versions. If this thing gets popular, it’ll drive itself out of existence without a revenue stream. How long until business ideas are married up to technical ideas to form actual businesses?
It’s going to be very hard to get me off twitter. They would really have to piss me off. Even if there is a good open-source alternative.
sent from: fav.or.it [FID261963]
@Grendel Turning it Open Source would make it more likely some big player (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) would adopt it. When I first noted that Emad used ASP.NET to build it I thought it was the most insane thing ever. ASP.NET! Then again, that may have been a crafty ploy there on his part. (P.S. Emad, don’t post the code to Google code) Get it up and running, have it ready to go when Microsoft announces their cloud computing services, and it is all ready to go as the first shining example.
@Chris Once the Twitter functionality is added, you wouldn’t have to leave Twitter. You just add it. And have more features.
You really think the $4000 investment in development is what’s kept Microsoft from copying Twitter? If there’s one thing we know about Microsoft, it’s that they like to make money. With a $4K price to play, if there were money to be made at it, even in incremental revenue or “building the brand”, don’t you think they would have done it? The fact is that Twitter is a big hole in the internet that you throw money into.
No, I think having to throw developers at maintaining and adding features to a 20-year-old codebase is what keeps Microsoft from building the next Twitter. Face it, they have done NOTHING in online innovation. They’ve purchased every web app they have, from Hotmail on forward; they want Yahoo, and are willing to get in bed with News Corp. to get it. They can’t think of innovation when they are trying to sell customers on the mess that is Vista, and coming up with “Windows 7″ when OS X is gaining customers with a far leaner code base and far fewer annoying features.
hey, i’m on twitter too - as passingnotes - but don’t you see the opportunity here? some corporations love twitter and even the wordpress guys took a step to hack a theme and display to simulate twitter for working groups (privacy controls) - this clone could become like the drupal of open source “group microblogging” platforms…not for a “twitter wannabe” type site, no need, twitter is already great, but for a small group, community, event specific and so on…or am i the only one for whom that idea screams out???
emad, thanks. already pinged you about helping out with documentation….
This is good feedback. Thanks for all the comments. First of all, the only reason I did this is because I wanted to play around with asp.net mvc framework (which kicks ass), so I figured I would try and reproduce twitter. i picked the twitter-concept because it is very easy and like Grendel said any half-decent programmer can do it in a couple of weeks… it’s really that easy.
This is NOT a business venture or anything like that. Which is exactly why I went the open source route… I just wanted to get it out there and have people hack at it… That’s all… Of course, if you want to buy it or donate money, I won’t stop you
@Cyndy, thanks again for all the comments…
@dave… Got your comment on my blog and will reply shortly.
@Dave You’ll have to show me a non-2.0 company other than Zappos who “loves” Twitter. Most of the big guns still see the majority of Web 2.0 technology as disruptive. My husband can’t access it, nor any web-based email or groups at his workplace.
@Emad I still shudder when you mention any Microsoft-based coding, so you’ll forgive my bias there. I started out using VB back in the 90s and I’m still in therapy.
@cyndy, here’s an interesting example, the LA Fire Dept is broadcasting alerts: http://twitter.com/LAFD
also, at http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Organizations you’ll see many large firms, including American Astronautical Society, CapGemini, Planned Parenthood and the San Francisco Zoo - i’d argue that none of these are “web 2.0″ players
ibm also has their own internal clone called “bluetwit” - bluetwit.hursley.ibm.com is *not* working though (just tried it, must have moved)
a big australian pharma company has built their own clone called ‘jitter’ - http://www.melcrumblog.com/2008/02/exploring-the-f.html
…i’d say the list goes on and on but i have no more time to dig up firms - but you’ll notice that a scan of twidir turns up most major companies….