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Last night, Yahoo's quasi-independent technology incubator, Brickhouse, launched a new social network for college students and college alumni: Kickstart. It is a professional network for the college crowd: it's supposed to help students, alumni, and recruiters all connect to share job information. It looks like the strict Venn intersection of Facebook and LinkedIn. (News story: Yahoo Kickstarts a social service aimed at college grads.)

It's a good idea, but only in a vacuum. If there were no LinkedIn, and Facebook were tiny, and Mash (see Yahoo finally gets a good social network) didn't exist, it might make great sense. But there are too many social networks already, and what makes a social network work is not its features but its people. I don't get how Kickstart is going to win over an audience as long as Facebook has a lock on the college demographic.

Kickstart is a professional social network for college students. As such, it's boring. But if it helps you get a job, then yay boring!

Since I'm not convinced that Kickstart can collect the user base it needs, it may seem just mean to also kick its feature set, but by current standards Kickstart is weak there, too. You can't even invite people who aren't already on the system (although it's easy to join if you have a Yahoo account). About all you can do right now is create a profile with your educational and work-related affiliations, see the same for your connections, and then message people in your network

Meanwhile, Yahoo has this other social network, Mash, that's not connected to Kickstart. And if you play on one network, you're going to be mighty irked when you have to recreate your profile and network on the other service, even if the whole idea is that the networks are supposed to be different: one for fun, one for work.

What Yahoo really needs for Kickstart is some way to integrate with existing social networks. You know, like OpenSocial. Then, theoretically, Yahoo could make it easier for users to join their specialized social network without having to completely recreate their online persona (unless they wanted to).

But for the moment, Kickstart seems like a project from before the Peanut Butter Manifesto. That is to say, not what Yahoo needs.

See also: Center Networks on Kickstart.

Yahoo is looking to change the game with their new social job network, Kickstart. They are currently conducting research surveys among college students to find out what they think of this new service. Yahoo asks this question to the participants, "Wish you had an 'in' to find the job of your dreams?" Kickstart is all about finding that "in."

Yahoo Kickstart connects college students with alumni at the companies that they are interested in. As you can see in the screenshot above, this student's "in" at Nike is an alumni named Dave Bottoms. Dave has expressed an interest in helping out students and connecting with alumni. He also knows one of your friends, went to your school, and shares a common interest with you. That's a really powerful networking tool. Presenting specific connections like this adds a whole new value to this job network.

Aside from showing your "in," company pages also provide some useful information about the company as a whole, broken down into key points such as industry, size, location, contact, and description. Anyone who is connected in any way with that company is also displayed.

As you might also expect, everyone who signs up with Yahoo Kickstart gets their own profile page, where you can build a mini resume and add a quotation to give the profile a more personal feel. Everything here is pretty standard for a social network, but there is a definite professional focus, much like LinkedIn. The personal profile isn't anything revolutionary, but it certainly gets the job done in this situation.

The third and final main component to Kickstart is the university page. This is very similar to what Facebook does with their "network" pages. It displays some basic information about the school and provides space for discussions, bulletins, and events.

Yahoo Kickstart is currently a concept and is being researched, so the things that you see in these screenshots may or may not make it into the final product. When I asked Yahoo for a comment on the service, they responded by saying,

"...We're continually checking the pulse on customer response to potential concepts on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes our research leads to the development of new product offerings, but not all concepts we research are formally developed and rolled out to our larger audience."

I personally think that Kickstart is a really solid concept and that it's a possible game-changer in the professional networking space. Hopefully we'll see Yahoo kickstarting some careers in the near future.