Yahoo’s advanced products group, led by Scott Gatz, is launching a new service this evening called Kickstart.
While immediate analogies will be drawn to Facebook, the service is actually much more like LinkedIn in that it connects students and alumni at specific colleges and universities and helps them connect on a professional level. Alumni can help students get jobs (or can find good students to fill spots at whatever company they work at), and students can reach out to others to help jumpstart their professional career. Doostang, an invitation-only job network which just raised $2.5 million, is also a point of comparison.
New users sign up for the service and add basic college and work information (by choosing a college, they also choose a network). Users are automatically connected to others than went to, or are going to, the school. And they can make other friends in the network as well.
Once the network gets started, Gatz says they’ll start to focus on events, message boards and other features. Eventually recruiters will be let in (Gatz promises not to let them spam users) as well.
Kickstart is focusing on getting alumni to sign up first, and will be offering a $25,000 prize to whichever college/university gets the most alumni to sign up before December 31.
What I liked about the service when I saw a demo last week was the possibility to find a deep database of individuals that went to the same schools that I did. And this clearly isn’t a place for pictures of partying and drinking - the whole point is to build up a professional network to help you move your career along. For young students just getting out of college this can be a very useful service. And they can keep having fun on Facebook…while pointing potential professional contacts to their Kickstart profiles.
Yesterday we covered a number of startups that are trying to recreate the college-only magic of Facebook. Kickstart isn’t one of those services, but college students may be flocking to it nonetheless.
You can see the whole team behind Kickstart here.
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is this a new version or same one that cnet wrote about in august?
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13515-9768418-26.html
the site is pretty basic…there is nothing compeling in there that would attract students there..I mean…the only main feature in there is connection even that, is a little out of focus. It is nothing like LinkedIn. The only thing that is worth mentioning on the site is graphics..that is all.
oh christ, just take it out back and shoot it. yahoo’s core demographic is purely web1.0 (which incidentally is a huge, easily monetizable audience which use the web to do things like read news, get stock quotes and sports scores), they should just bite the bullet and realize they have negative karma with college kids and younger.
yahoo frankly just needs to bite the bullet, integrate with opensocial, and stop trying to go it alone…they have a large audience but are not relevant to where the web is headed anymore (once again, not to knock its previously established audience, they are quite loyal)
Oh c’mon whopie, it’s a fun retro thing. Plus - it crashes on the second page with a “Sorry please try again” error. Page back in the browser reveals:
“handle different open error constantsthe error is 5cookies are expired bounce to password prompthandle other different credential error constants”
Oops. Maybe tomorrow AM.
Too little, too late for Y! with launch of this.
Looks like they tried to acquire existing players and now finally after losing out on that, they are now trying to play it alone.
Being a product guy myself, I should say, they could have done much better.
Okay… one difference could be SN is a feature with kickstart, if I understand it correctly.
it also looks very similar to Yahoo Mash especially all the layout. I think i would expect something better from a large company like Yahoo.
At least their logo doesn’t say beta…
How far beyond college are you commenters? I actually wish very much there was a service like this when I was graduating and looking around for the right place to start my career.
oh and the clipart again - yahoo properties are getting lousy with clipart/stock photos everywhere. who greenlights this crap? i am seeing some properties with 60% of the page KB dedicated to downloading some stock image from getty etc.
does anyone use a site because they draw confidence from the stock photo of the old lady sipping tea with a serene smile? or the couple playfully engaging each other?
Affinity Circles is the leading provider of trusted social networks for college alumni associations. One of the key advantages of partnering with the associations is the ability to authenticate the identity and academic credentials of all users. Kickstart has no way of doing this, making it less valuable to both users and employers.
Yikes Yahoo. Why complicate the Mash launch with yet another social network that will live totally in the buzz shadow of Open Social? I suppose if Mash and this can easily be Open Socialed later they might as well toss this hat in the ring too, but I’m concerned Yahoo is shooting too wildly when they simply need to adopt a single, powerful social environment and push millions of users to that single environment.
OK - I just got it. Mash is to compete with Myspace, this with Facebook. Unfortunately Open Social blows all this up to the next generation and it seems Yahoo should seek to build a super open, one network fits all solution for Yahoo users.
For every startup there is a competitor. Commerce in America, and on the internet, provides consumers options. I think KickStart, if maintained, could steal a chunk of LinkedIn’s POTENTIAL client base. If KickStart focus its Market strategy on colleges and Seniors\recent college Graduates entering the workforce, they could form a really STRONG Brand. LinkedIn needs to improve their service very quickly or it will lose it’s position.
wow, i like the idea but this seems to me so not in Yahoo’s core space….
it seems someone could pretty easily build a facebook app to do this (if there is not already one)
@14 - Drew, you easily could make a facebook app that does this. But I don’t want companies looking at my facebook seeing as it’s probably not very professional.
Do we need yet another social web utility for college students? C’mon! Facebook already has a massive install base and college users already have massive equity in the existing platforms (i.e. myspace and facebook), why would they bother to adopt yet another social platform to build up their equity (i.e, photo sharing, friends, blogs, etc.) again? Moreover, in light of OpenSocial’s soft lauch it seems rather odd - and silly - that Yahoo would try to go out and build its own proprietary social platform. Yahoo, you’re late to the party and guess what? No one cares.
I agree with Nik Bonaddio (#8)
I think Kickstart will be a great service for the recent/soon-to-be college graduate.
There is a definite void between the full time college student who uses facebook exclusively for entertainment and the professional with 5+ years of experience under his belt.
LinkedIn is pretty useless for someone who does not have real life contacts built up from work experience, and Facebook, well Facebook is full of drunk pictures.
Hey, I have already taken over FaceBook!
Yahoo, you guys are supposed to be on my side?
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I was really disappointed… I thought I was going to have a direct competitor for Path 101 (blog.path101.com) but instead they’re obviously going after LinkedIn and Facebook. Why? Why? Why? Why? Especially after Open Social?
Now, as a digital presence, there sure does need to be something in between Facebook and LinkedIn, but the connecting… connecting is a commodity and they would have been better off outsourcing the connections via Open Social to LinkedIn or integrating with Facebook in some way.
@ 17 “LinkedIn is pretty useless for someone who does not have real life contacts built up from work experience, and Facebook, well Facebook is full of drunk pictures.”
I fully agree with that statement.
Also; Maybe if people focused on labeling this a service first, social network second, then perhaps they could see that Facebook is not necessarily all-encompassing and this could very well be a great service in itself.
For this to succeed though, I think Yahoo! needs to be very clear and pinpointing the right stuff in their communication with college students.
Also that they don’t slack off and let this degrade into a regular social network. I think, just keep the functionality focused and somewhat limited and resist any calls for functionality that mirrors Facebooks too much.
They are filling the niche that Facebook gave away and more.
What Linkedin needs to do is allow users to go through and find alumni that they can connect with in certain industries, because LinkedIn is relatively useless for college grads trying to find jobs/ make connections since they know very, very few business people. We go from having 300 facebook friends to 6 connections on LinkedIn that can’t help us do anything.
If LinkedIn expands an alumni feature than this whole Yahoo thing would be pointless, if not, the real question is how many 30, 40 something alums will actually sign up for Kickstart, otherwise it’s ‘just graduated’ facebook that doesn’t actually help kickstart anybody’s career anyways.
Yahoo makes no sense lately. Have they got too many engineers and product managers not knowing what to put their hands on? Or does it take them twice as much time as everyone else to make a website (assuming they started developing Kickstart 3 years ago)? They look like a trapped animal - running back and forth inside a cage. Just look at this:
bought Flickr - but closed Yahoo Photos (i.e. lost some users to picasa)
opened Mash - closed 360 - Open kickstart (i.e. lost users to Facebook and blogger)
Bought Zimbra - what’s next? are they going to close Yahoo mail for some weird reason and then reopen it with an outdated twist 6 months later, when all disappointed users switch to hotmail and gmail?
Or is it that they just don’t know how to evaluate an idea before throwing it out there to the public?
Meet awesome Kickstart PM Cynthia Johanson in person at Women 2.0’s Fireside Chat on November 15th - more info at http://www.women2.org
See you there,
~ang*e
Angie Chang
Co-Founder and Coordinator
Women 2.0
http://www.women2.org
-=Connecting women in technology, business, and entrepreneurship=-
Jesus. Now we have a new version of Women.
Could someone please explain to me what Women 2.0 does.
If I am not happy with your definition, then I suppose I better get to work on my futuristic Women 3.0 model.