WebProNews

Due to the arrival of OpenSocial, it felt like social networking had reached a new stage of development; Facebook stood alone, but other companies began to march under a single flag.  Now, however, there’s another “loose” contender called Kickstart.

Kickstart comes to us courtesy of Yahoo, and intends to serve people who are either in college or graduated in the recent past.  Thanks to its focus on career development - Kickstart will try to put users in touch with well-placed alumni - it’s been compared to LinkedIn.

Kickstart doesn’t appear to be in a position to compete with LinkedIn, though.  One of three “featured companies” - Teach For America - has exactly zero “past and present employees” associated with Kickstart.  And even if Yahoo’s gotten 264 of its own people to sign up, less than half appear to have bothered with profile pictures.

As for the idea that Kickstart would compete with MySpace or Facebook, well . . .  Yahoo obviously has that in mind.  “Uncle Ron may work for IBM, but it doesn’t mean you want him writing on your wall or poking your friends,” states Kickstart’s homepage, in an obvious dig at Facebook.  But something that can’t keep up with LinkedIn won’t be able to touch either larger site.

Nonetheless, we’ll keep you up to date on Kickstart as it develops; there are some good ideas at work, and perhaps Yahoo will pull out a surprising success.