Green Tea Ice Cream

Last week News.com reported that Yahoo were piecing together a new recruitment/business focused social networking platform targeting students and graduates to be called Kickstart. They even reproduced screenshots. It’s generated a certain amount of noise but as of yesterday, I couldn’t find any mention of it on any of the Yahoo blogs. It’s apparently (Mashable report) in trials with college students. The screenshots look more like LinkedIn than Facebook…

(source: News.com)

…but with a much richer media interface. One interesting point is (Market Pilgrim points out) that to join a group for a particular company, you’ll need to have an invite from an employer who was also an alumnus of your college or school. That might prove a little bit of a barrier to growth. From the point of HE institutions, it would also reinforce the difficulty of non Ivy League (US) or Russell Group (UK) universities in getting the ‘high-end’ of the graduate recruitment market to pay attention. Also, the real competitors in this highly specialised market are people like Vault.

Vault claim that

There’s a reason Fortune recently called Vault “The best place on the Web to prepare for a job search.” Job seekers, students and professionals have discovered that Vault is the Internet’s ultimate destination for insider career and education information.

In terms of university careers services, they own the high-end of the competition. On the other hand, they aren’t set up as a social networking site. Neither (though they talk about it a lot) are the bigger UK competitors, Graduate Prospects and (Hobsons) Doctor Job. Actually, one wonders whether SN is really necessary - I wonder whether most users (the ones employers might want to hire at any rate) aren’t savvy enough to stripmine these sites for information and then head over to Facebook for the actually networking.

Of course, it may never launch. Yahoo (think 360) are still trying to gain traction in the social networking marketplace. Flickr remains their most conspicuous success - and they had to buy it. Now, they were to put something together which allowed people to import their relationships from existing Yahoo social networking properties, it might get off to a flying start. But then, where’s the USP? And do we really need another LinkedIn?