Yahoo! Kickstart: LinkedIn for college students and alumni

If your university guidance counselor wasn't much help in your job hunt, maybe Yahoo! can help. The internet portal's latest social network helps college students and alumni connect with one another to create a sort of post-grad professional network. In other words, Yahoo! Kickstart is a lot like LinkedIn, except you don't get to connect with coworkers, just people associated with your alma mater.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! execs are hoping to fill a niche somewhere in between Facebook and LinkedIn. The idea is that recent grads don't have all the work connections that LinkedIn users have. And they use Facebook for keeping up with friends, not professional contacts. We're not sure this is an actual niche and not just a marketing gimmick, but only time will tell.

Yahoo! is also reportedly preparing a new service that will let users indicate their physical location at any given time, letting web apps act accordingly. For example, if you're on your home or work computer you might want different settings than if you're using an iPhone.

Tags: FireEagle, Kickstart, Yahoo!-Kickstart