14 DAY TRIAL // Announced a little over 2 months ago, on August the 30th, Yahoo Inc. is launching today the social networking service designed to help college students get the career help they so desperately need sometimes. It was developed by a young Yahoo unit charged with advancing product innovation, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Although many have not taken seriously this project at the time it was announced, predicting that it will never reach the light of day either as a standalone project or as part of an existing Yahoo property such as 360, it is here and will most likely be here to stay. And on a side note, it will outlive Yahoo! 360 which is scheduled to be closed at the beginning of next year, the user id's and every other piece of data being set to migrate to the next social network of Yahoo, supposedly named Mosh.
Kevin J Delany of The Wall Street Journal says that KickStart will be "the service for college students to tap into a network of professionals willing to help them with internships, job prospects and career advice. Yahoo believes Kickstart will be valuable to young people who don't yet have extensive contact lists on professional social networks such as LinkedIn Corp. and who use other social networks such as Facebook Inc. primarily to communicate with friends."
FireEagle (code name) is also supposed to be launched this month by the people at Yahoo's Advanced Products and Brickhouse groups, a service that will allow individuals to indicate their location at a given moment, providing data that web applications can draw on. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of Advanced Development, said the groups were taking a "portfolio approach," where they would try many things -- the majority of which would likely fail - in order to learn and create successful offerings.
While Yahoo! still has ways to go in order to reach its peak when it comes to social networks, the recently released service, KickStart seems like as good a place as any to restart working on such a project. Wish them luck.