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Yahoo is building a social network for college students looking for jobs. Named Yahoo Kickstart (and presumably at kickstart.yahoo.com if/when it goes live), the service connects college students with alumni at the companies they'd like to work for.
As CNET explains, users have profile pages in the resume style of LinkedIn, rather than the free-flowing multimedia profiles you'll see at MySpace and Facebook. In a system very similar to Facebook's company networks, meanwhile, companies have groups that college students can join. To get access to these groups, you must go via an alumni who works at that company: this person is called your "In" at that company. There are university pages, too, with forums and events.
Yahoo Kickstart may never see the light of day: it's still a concept in testing with college students. But if the tests are a success (and there's certainly a lot of money in recruiting,), Yahoo will roll out the network officially. The only issue is that such a network would always be in the shadow of Facebook and LinkedIn: expect constant comparisons between the services if this is launched. The other issue: Facebook already has the social graphs of most college students: it's much easier for them to dominate this space than a newcomer.
A question: did Yahoo start developing this network after the failed acquisition of Facebook?
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