I received an invitation to create first Egyptian Twitter like community on Yonkly.com. Thanks to Emad Ibrahim Creator and Founder of Yonkly.

Before I go further; you might ask What is Yonkly? My answer is: it is an enhanced twitter like mini blogging service. It is an open source project based on ASP.NET MVC. It is one of the first projects developed with early preview releases of ASP.NET MVC. This project was developed by Emad Ibrahim.

More information about Yonkly can be found at http://www.emadibrahim.com/category/yonkly/. You can download bits of this project from CodePlex.

2 different flavours of Yonkly are available through Yonkly.com, and Yonkly.net. The public Twitter clone is available at Yonkly.net, this is exactly like twitter with additional features like Groups. The other flavour which I am going to call community like edition is available under Yonkly.com. At Yonkly.com you can create your own community like Egyptian Yonklies I just created for Egyptian Tweeters. Both are in Beta as ASP.NET MVC itself is beta. Currently it require an invitation to be able to create your own network under Yonkly.com.

I think what is available on Yonkly.net should be available for each network under Yonkly.com. But this is something Emad should decide.

Today I was exploring Yonkly features while I was setting up egyonklies.yonkly.com. I was amazed by the provided features which I am sure is going to be enhanced and improved upon the release of ASP.NET MVC and in the upcoming releases of Yonkly.

Yonkly provide a simple control panel for community administrators through this control panel an admin can edit settings, appearance, email templates and many other things.

I thought to give you a snap shot of the currently available settings on yonkly.

I liked that it provides a way to link to custom domain and changing home page. However Emad also talked on one of his posts about Widgets and Ads. Ads is provided out of the box but currently is not released on this beta version of community yonkly. But what about Widgets?! This is one of the cool features found on Yonkly.net! So far I couldn't find it under my community network. With widget each user should be able to add sidebar widgets that should appear on his page. If you visited http://yonkly.net/mosessaur you'll figure that out.

With yonkly you can brand your network with your own custom look and feel. Currently you can change you theme from one of available themes. You can also change your logo. But later you'll be able to do more customizations on the look and feel of your network.

That was Yonkly at a glance. I wish for this project to grow and grow. This project is one of the greatest learning resources about ASP.NET MVC. So don't forget to download it and explore its code.

At the end feel free to join Egyptian Yonklies network even if you are not Egyptian. It is new and hopefully will grow by its participants.