Yahoo Kickstart

» see kickstart.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

yahoo kickstart was aimed at us undergraduates and their alumni networks. i was a senior in an engineering program in ankara. the entire product framing (automatic placement into your university's alumni page, a directory of working graduates in your field) was aimed at a college labor market that did not extend to me.

the beta preview opened on 5 november 2007. the pitch was linkedin for people not yet on linkedin, meaning undergraduates and recent graduates who would still list their major and internships instead of a decade of job history. yahoo's advanced products team in san francisco built it. yahoo offered a $25,000 prize to whichever school got the most alumni to register before 31 december 2007. it was the kind of promotional move that suggested the product was not going to grow on its own.

it did not grow on its own. server downtime and error messages became public complaints inside months. by the end of 2008 yahoo had closed kickstart and redirected traffic to yahoo hotjobs, its older and larger recruiting property. hotjobs itself was sold to monster in early 2010 and shut down in 2011, which is when the last thread of the yahoo career-services line went quiet.

the actual winner of the college-networking category turned out to be facebook, not any of yahoo's professional plays. facebook had launched to college students in 2004 and had been the default identity layer on us campuses for three years by the time kickstart opened its beta. linkedin picked up the professional side later, and yahoo's attempt to slot between them lasted thirteen months.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

a small linkedin, essentially. profile pages functioning as informal resumes with education and internships instead of a decade of job history, plus university pages that included message boards and alumni directories. connection requests worked like linkedin's, with the college network doing the vouching instead of a shared job.

~ the decline ~

yahoo shipped kickstart into a category that already had two clear winners. facebook owned identity on us campuses, and linkedin owned professional identity for people out of school. kickstart's slot (undergraduates thinking about their working future) was narrow, and it required students to maintain a profile on a third network specifically for career signaling. most did not.

on the operations side, the beta struggled visibly. users hit login errors and slow pages consistently enough that press coverage started calling it out. yahoo was already in the middle of a broader retreat from its social-web adventures. mash had closed three months earlier, and kickstart went next quietly.

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