Yahoo's new social job network: Kickstart
Yahoo is looking to change the game with their new social job network, Kickstart. They are currently conducting research surveys among college students to find out what they think of this new service. Yahoo asks this question to the participants …
Context & Ripple Effects
Yahoo is testing Kickstart, a social network built around jobs and career connections, and is running research surveys with college students to gauge reaction before a full launch. Pre-launch polling of exactly the audience the service targets suggests Yahoo wants a demand signal before spending further on the product.
The timing matters: it lands two days after Yahoo's management announced a company-wide reorganization, and closes out an August in which the company rolled out a revamped Yahoo Local, extended Search to dynamic URLs, and publicly denied any pursuit of a MySpace acquisition. Kickstart reads as another bet in a portfolio being reshuffled under new structure.
First-order effects
- College students surveyed now have direct influence over Kickstart's design, giving Yahoo an early read on whether a social-graph-plus-job-listing format resonates before committing launch resources.
- Kickstart enters Yahoo's crowded internal slate — coming on top of the Local overhaul and search changes — meaning it competes for engineering and product attention inside a firm mid-reorganization.
Second-order effects
- If student feedback is positive, Yahoo gains a recruiting-oriented audience asset that complements its portal properties; if negative, the reorganized structure makes it easier to shelve the project than it would have been under the old divisions.
- A social job network aimed at graduates pushes Yahoo toward the same campus demographic that established social networks and career sites court, raising the stakes of its denied MySpace acquisition path — building rather than buying.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to portals extending their franchises by layering social features onto verticals — jobs here, local earlier in August — rather than launching standalone social destinations, a structural choice about where social graphs should live.
- Survey-driven greenlighting signals a shift toward treating new social products as experiments to be validated cheaply before scale, changing how large consumer internet firms allocate launch budgets.
The trend: Portals in 2007 are bolting social layers onto existing verticals like jobs and local instead of building standalone social networks, using pre-launch research to decide which bets survive.