Yonkly: Open Source May Do It Better

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!