Yahoo Launches Kickstart, A New Social Network Around College Students And Alumni

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. 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.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/04/yahoo-launches-kickstart-a-new-social-network-around-college-students-and-alumni/