First Impressions: Yahoo's Kickstart Social Network

You have to give Yahoo credit for giving social networking that good old college try, again. This time around Yahoo is launching Kickstart, a social network site for college students who may want something a bit more professional than Facebook and not as uptight as LinkedIn. The launch comes barely two months after Yahoo debuted social networking site Mash.

I took a look at Kickstart as it is available today in "preview mode" and think it's a bright idea, but is in need of a few fixes.

Yahoo Kickstart tries to be different than other social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook by appealing to students and college alumni who are looking for a "kickstart" into the professional world. In Yahoo's words Kickstart is "is a professional network with a distinct purpose," as current college students and recent grads can use the service to find internships or jobs, or even garner career advice if they need it.

Getting Started with Kickstart

Assembling a profile is pretty straightforward: you just give Kickstart your name, your university, as well as any optional info like job experience or resume-esque skills and interests. In fact, when you're done creating your profile it looks closer to a traditional resume than a profile you might expect to find on a social networking site. Bottom line, your profile actually works in the same way a resume does: the more experience you've tacked on or people you've networked with, the better your profile looks. Yahoo's own Scott Gatz has a pretty striking example of what a completed profile can look like.

While Kickstart is a bright idea, the current preview version of the service is in need of a few fixes. For one, if you add a current or prior job to your profile, you can only designate the time you worked there in years, not months. As any college kid can tell you, most internships only run for a few months at a time, and having to list it on Kickstart as lasting "2007 ? 2007" isn't exactly specific.

Second, I'm not entirely convinced Yahoo can strike the balance between casual and professional with a single service. Under its "Top Ten Reasons to Use Kickstart," Yahoo insists you can "keep your social profile fun, but your professional profile polished." That said, you'll probably want to reserve those beer-chugging profile pictures for MySpace or Facebook. As Kickstart's upload page warns: "You'll want to use a professional-looking photo, since your future boss may see this."

Yahoo's other social network, Mash, (which is still under wraps as an invite-only beta), on the other hand is more Facebook/MySpace like. When I looked at the beta version of Mash last month the service seemed to be more about creating an environment where I could doodle around on your friends' profile pages and have fun. Kickstart, on the other hand, pushes you to be "grown up" and get your foot in the door in the post-college real world.

All told, I think Kickstart has potential. The deciding factor of course is in how many people end up signing up, and even there Yahoo is already offering the incentive: a $25,000 donation to the college with the most alumni registered on Kickstart.

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