Yahoo launches Y! Kickstart-yet another social networking site

Yahoo! has launched another social networking service that few people are likely to use.

Yesterday, the behind-the-times web portal unveiled something called Y! Kickstart, a service aimed at youngsters struggling to make a go of it in the real world.

"Yahoo! realized that new graduates anPublish Postd college students were in dire need of a way to build a professional network, but that existing solutions were either too tailored to seasoned professionals, or too geared towards communicating and keeping in touch with friends," a company spokeswoman told us. "Kickstart is a professional network designed to meet that need through a community of college students, recent grads, professionals, and alumni."

So the company thinks it's found a niche between LinkedIn and Facebook. It's taken LinkedIn-style business networking and applied it to the social-networking-obsessed youngsters who've fallen head over heels for Facebook.
Yes, Facebook is now open to internet users of all ages, bridging the student and business worlds, but Yahoo! is sure that it's ill-suited to post-college job hunting. "College students are amazingly well networked on Facebook," reads a blog post from Scott Gatz, Yahoo! senior director of advanced products, "but that network is about connecting with friends and is more appropriate for fun - in fact many students we talked to expressed frustration that 'old folks' were coming onto Facebook and forcing them to lock down their profiles or worse yet - clean up their act."