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Winner will be randomly selected on May 31st.

Winner will be notified by a DM on Twitter.   Make sure you follow us or we won’t be able to DM you.

Winner must respond within 24 hours of DM.  If no response is received, new winner will be selected.

Winner will be sent Kindle 2 directly from Amazon.com to his/her house.

Free shipping to USA destinations.

Non-USA winners must pay shipping, taxes and any other extra fees.

Singapore. – With Twitter growing at an incredible rate, users can easily get lost in a sea of micro posts. Yonkly.com is the first website to allow users to cut through the clutter and create personalized microblogs that integrate with Twitter.

Users simply type in their network name, create an account and they’re ready to go. Eventually, Yonkly.com will be integrated with all major microblogging platforms, allowing everyone to post messages in one place. Currently, Yonkly has a SAAS business model; they also hope to release an open-source version of Yonkly soon.

Designed by dot net programmer, Emad Ibrahim, the site allows people to design their own microblogging platform from a custom design, character length, question and domain name.

More than 3,000 people have quietly been using Yonkly during the sites development stages. Numerous sites enable users to create a microblog; however what differentiates Yonkly from the rest are focus and quality. This is immediately observed through the platform’s architectures and integration with multiple services.

“Our goal was to develop a fast, feature-rich, world-class platform,” said Ibrahim. “I think the major problem that other platforms are encountering is quality. They’ve chosen the ‘launch fast at all cost’ philosophy. We could have launched six months earlier, but chose to really research and understand our users’ needs.”

Many speculate that Yonkly’s early success stems not only from the popularity of microblogging, but because of what the site represents –control, knowledge and community.

“We want our users to cultivate a community of bloggers revolving around personalized platforms. There’s a lot of noise on the net and we pride ourselves on enabling knowledge, not noise,” said Ibrahim.

Microblogging popularity is growing exponentially with Twitter hitting over 14 million unique visitors in March 2009.

According to Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch.com, “Twitter is having its hockey stick moment in terms of its growth just shooting up. Last week it may have delivered its billionth Tweet, at least nominally. And it looks like it is approaching escape velocity.”

Yonkly has developed a niche among microbloggers. The online sector is continuing to grow and it should be a fun ride for all entities involved.

Links: http://yonkly.com

Yonkly is a niche microblogging platform, started by Emad Ibrahim as a side-project based on ASP.NET MVC. It is one of the first projects developed with early preview releases of ASP.NET MVC..

# # #

Orig Post : http://aplink.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/niche-microblogging-platform-first-to-integrate-with-twitter/

Michael is a director of Uniloc USA and served as its CEO in 2006 and 2007. Uniloc is a developer of computer and DVD security technology. Previously he was CEO of The Mind Electric, a developer of web services infrastructure software which was acquired by Webmethods in October 2003. Previously Mike served as Chairman and CEO of Entigo Corporation, a developer of enterprise software for the manufacturing sector, where he was recognized by Ernst and Young as 2001 Entrepreneur of the Year in Western Pennsylvania for the e-business software category. Prior to Entigo, Mike was Vice Chairman of and President of the IT services division of Oxford Global Resources, a $200 million IT services firm which was subsequently acquired by On Assignment. Mike graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts in three years of study, holds an M.B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and a J.D. from Georgetown University. He is a CPA and a member of the District of Columbia Bar Association.

Wow!!!  And that is the short version.  As you can see from the bio above, he is a huge win for Yonkly. 

Welcome Michael.

Q: What do you do?

A: I run an Internet startup called Yonkly.

Q: What is Yonkly?

A: Yonkly is a hosted microblog platform that allows anyone to create his white-label Twitter-like community.

Q: What is Twitter?

A: Twitter is a microblog

Q: What is a microblog?

A: blah blah

Now, I will be able to answer these questions by simply pointing them to this article.

So, what is microblogging?  Or a better question is how do you explain microblogging to someone who doesn’t know what Twitter is?  At the risk of sounding condescending to the person I am speaking to, I try to break things down to the basics using terms he is familiar with.

Almost 9 out of 10 times the person I am talking to knows what Facebook is.  I mean, my dad has more friends on Facebook than I do and he is 61 and English is his second language.  So, I usually start with Facebook.

You already know Facebook.  Imagine the status box in Facebook – that’s the box where you write a short sentence about what you are feeling/doing/thinking/etc…

Now take that status box and then remove everything else from Facebook – no photos, no wall, no applications, no videos, nothing – just the status box.

What do you end up with?  The answer is: Twitter

And, what is Twitter?  It’s a microblog.  Just like the Facebook status box, you update your status in a microblog, your friends will see it and you will see your friends’ updates.  Now, you are microblogging.

It is important to point out an important distinction between the Facebook status box and microblogging.  Microblogging is public (most of the time).  Everything you write (microblog) can be seen by the whole world.  Go ahead and visit my twitter page at www.twitter.com/eibrahim  and you will be able to read all my updates.  Even if we are not friends on Twitter and even if you are not signed up or logged in.  Note: Some microblogs enable you to control the privacy of your updates so that only your friends can see them.

Another distinction is the way “friendship” works in microblogs.  You can “follow” anyone you want and anyone can “follow” you.  Following someone means that you are interested in what they have to say and that you want their updates to show up on your homepage – think of it as subscribing to their microblog.  It is also important to note that you can send direct/private messages only to users that are following you.  This reduces spam; since if you spam your followers, most likely they will stop following you.  This is true both in Twitter and Yonkly-powered microblogs.

So how do you use Twitter or microblogs in general?  Well there are many ways to use microblogs; some people use them for marketing their products, services, company, website, blog, book or whatever.  Others use it to communicate with like-minded people to share ideas and/or links.  I personally follow people that I am interested in what they are saying such as other developers, entrepreneurs, marketers and so on.  Sometime I will post an update that is completely useless.

Other times, I will post useful stuff.

Sometimes I will ask a question.

  or

9 out of 10 times I get an answer within minutes.  I also answer other people questions whenever I can.

You can see more of my updates (and follow me) at www.twitter.com/eibrahim.

Now you know what Twitter is and what Microblogs are, so what is Yonkly?  Imagine you want to create a website that does the same thing as Twitter but for a niche market/special-interest/specific topic, how would you do it?  There are several options out there.

- You can create the software or hire someone to create it for your from scratch.  It will probably cost several thousands to develop, test, debug and maintain.

- You can buy an off the shelf microblog platform or download and open source/free version (www.yonkly.com/buy) and then pay someone to customize it, host it and maintain it for you.

- Or you can create a microblog in about 30 seconds at www.yonkly.com for under $5/month.

That’s what Yonkly allows you to do.  We do not compete with Twitter or Facebook.  We provide a platform for YOU to create your own microblog network about anything.  For example, we have a customer that created a microblog for photography enthusiasts.

We have another that created a collaborative writing microblog at www.writezoo.com

Another customer created a t-shirt community at www.teeburb.com

That begs the question: Why should I create a Yonkly-Powered microblog when I can just use Twitter?  Like I said earlier there are many reasons to do so.  Maybe you want to:

- create a community for your product or service

- create a community for your customers

- create a community for a special-interest topic or group (sports, brand, movie star, TV show, etc.)

- create a collaborative environment for your company/team/group/association

Why use Yonkly and not the competition?

- Yonkly is better – really, try it out for yourself.

- Yonkly is white-label (see www.isweat.com, there is no reference of Yonkly and is completely self contained)

- You can use your own domain.

- You can post pictures and text

- You can customize the look and feel

- You can customize the status update size and the question to ask your users

- Yonkly integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa

- Yonkly has a powerful admin control panel

I hope this article serves its intended purpose of answering the questions mentioned above and more importantly the question “What is Yonkly?”.  If you still have questions then please post them below.

According to Nielsen Online’s most recent report (shown below), 66.8% of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities” last year. Only 65.1% centered on accessing email.

What does this mean?

We, at Yonkly, believe that there’s an inherrent need to connect. We find that the internet’s pervasive natures is extremely powerful, in that, it allows people with similiar interests to get in touch with one another. While we believe this is important, we also believe that having constant communication with your support hub is just as meaningful.

Another nice figure centered on member communities (which Yonkly falls into). In 2008, users spent 63% more time on member communities than they did in 2007. Within member communities, Facebook saw growth of 566% in time spent on it by users worldwide. As has been reported elsewhere, Facebook’s fastest growth demographic is older users – the social network tacked on 12.4 million people between ages 35-49 in 2008 according to Nielsen.

Bottom line: Conncecting and cultivating relationships within hubs that center on your interest is critical, and will experience even more growth in 2009.

The full report is embedded below:

socialnetworkreach – Free Legal Forms

You can now go to your member administration section in your control panel.

Click the Members icon

Click View Members, then click the username of the member you want to administer.

Once there, you will be able to block the user and/or delete his/her message(s)

As an added bonus, you can delete messages throughout the site without having to go to the admin control panel.

Of course, you have to be an administrator to perform these functions.  If you block a user, he will not be able to login to the site again and if he tries, he will get this message:

Let me try and guess what your next question is going to be: “Can I delete the user account?”.  Right now, the answer is NO.  It turns out deleting an account is a lot hard that I thought.  But you can pseudo-delete the user by deleting his messages and blocking him.

Are these features free?

You have to be a subscriber to be able to block users and delete their messages.  It is only $4.95 a month or in other words 16 cents a day.

What’s missing?

Did we miss a feature that you have been waiting for?  Let us know and we will do our best to accommodate you.

Want to help?  Give us a thumbs up at StumbleUpOn

Currently, this is an opt-in feature and if you would like to enable it, just visit your Admin Control Panel, click on Settings and check the “Enable Facebook Connect” checkbox at the bottom of the page.

This will add a Facebook Connect button to the login and signup page.  So you and your users can simply click it and automatically log in.  It is that simple.

The first time you or your users click the button they will be prompted to authorize your Facebook application to access their Facebook account.

Once they do they will be asked to link their existing Yonkly account or create a new one.  From then on, all they have to do login is click the “Connect with Facebook” button.

Once they authorize your site access to their Facebook profile, they will be able to invite their friends to join your network by clicking the “Invite” link on the top navigation bar.

Best of all this feature is free and available to all network owners even free accounts.  But if you are using a custom domain such as in the case of www.christtr.com and www.hotwitter.com then you have to do a couple of extra steps.  The reason is that Facebook uses your domain name to verify that you are a valid user and not just someone trying to steal Facebook accounts.  So, if you are using a custom domain and want to setup Facebook Connect then read this.  This has the added benefit to completely customize the experience for your users, even the Facebook prompt has your logo and your site name as shown in the above screen shots from www.christtr.com.  They will never know anything about Yonkly – a true white-label experience.

As always, please let us know what you think or if you are having any problems.  You post your questions, comments, complaints and compliments in our Google Group.

Yonkly offers a white-label platform that enables anyone and everyone to create a twitter-clone/microblog network for anything.  The same way Ning allows you to create a Facebook-clone/social network.  Just like Ning, Yonkly offers a hosted solution that is fully customizable.  For as little as 5 bucks a month, you have your own Twitter-clone that you don’t have to install, maintain or upgrade.  It just works.

You can have your own look and feel (christtr.com).

You can have your own domain (isweat.com).

You can target any niche market (photographersjournal.com).

You can even run your own advertising if you want and make some money (writezoo.com).

You can create private networks for your company, team, group or anything.

You can integrate with Flickr, Picasa and Twitter (more integration points coming soon).

There are ton more features, check out the tour over here.

It is very possible that one day Yonkly will be in the top 25 list.  In the meantime, why don’t you go create a free account and try it out at yonkly.com

PS: Don’t want a hosted solution?  Prefer to host your own?  No problem, we are selling the source code, click here for more info.

We are giving away a free premium subscription for a year to Yonkly and a $25 gift certificate.  All you have to do to win is follow @yonkly on twitter at www.twitter.com/yonkly.  You might also want to create an account at www.yonkly.com so we can enable your free subscription if you win.

We will pick a random follower and send him/her a direct message on twitter.  You must respond back within 2 hours and if you don’t, we will pick another winner.

Thanks & Good luck.

First, Yonkly has over 1000 networks live and kickin’. We hate cliche’s, which is also why we never use them. We only like facts. So here’s a fact: we couldn’t have done it without you. Seriously. Our marketing efforts have all come from word of mouth. If it were not for you positive word, we’d be struggling.

Although we like positive word of mouth, we realize that the only way we can grow is if we hear some negative word of mouth. The biggest constructive piece of feedback was our price. There wasn’t a free version available.

Well now there is a free version available. And in addition to that, we’ve dramatically dropped our prices.

Check out the new Yonkly prices here.

The basic plan is now $4.95 a month which half what it used to be. The power plan is $14.95 which is almost a third of what it used to be. Last but not least, our best-selling premium plan is now only $24.95 which is a quarter of what the price used. Call us crazy, but we went one step further and took another 16% off these prices if you pay for an annual plan. For the sake of full disclosure, since we have a free plan now, we don’t offer a trial period anymore but we do offer a 7-day money-back guarantee.

The Yonkly Source Code:

For the technically savvy and adventurous, we have a hidden link on the site where you can buy the source code, check it out at www.yonkly.com/buy. We are debating whether to keep selling the source code or not, so you might want to grab it right away before we change our mind.

Click here for Yonkly Source Code.