Yahoo on Monday launched another social network, but this one is aimed at a more targeted audience: college students, alumni and job recruiters. The idea is to get college graduates their first jobs
in the real world. Scott Gatz, senior director of Yahoo's Advanced Products, says "it's a professional network with a purpose--to help college students and recent graduates build a professional
network." The social network is called Kickstart; it launched on Monday.
Yahoo thinks Kickstart can carve a little niche for itself by being a kind of anti-Facebook, as the site is focused on
career advancement, not fun, says CNET, making it more of a direct competitor with the professional social network LinkedIn. Gatz, however, isn't concerned about the competition. "LinkedIn doesn't
cross the minds of college students," he says.
Separately, Yahoo on Monday launched a developer platform arena for its Brickhouse technology incubator. Codenamed FireEagle, CNET says the
platform enables people to provide information that's distributed across multiple applications like social networks, blogs, and IM programs. "The platform geocodes the data and makes it
machine-readable so other applications can plug into it, publish to it, or read from it," says Salim Ismail, head of Brickhouse.
Read the whole story at CNET News.com »
