Yahoo! has launched its social network, Kickstart, aimed at college students, alumni, and recruiters. The portal leader says its Kickstart allows users to create a professional profile, browse company profiles and network with their peers, professors, alumni and potential employers.

"College students are amazingly well networked on Facebook, but that network is about connecting with friends and is more appropriate for fun – in fact many students we talked to expressed frustration that 'old folks' were coming onto Facebook and forcing them to lock down their profiles or worse yet – clean up their act," wrote cott Gatz, senior director of advanced products and head of the Kickstart project.

The company apparently thinks it's found a niche between LinkedIn and Facebook, as LinkedIn doesn't really appeal to college students and Facebook is fun-oriented. Yahoo! appears to want Kickstart to be somewhere in the middle: it will provide professional connecting opportunities, while it will refrain from being as uptight as LinkedIn.

In an effort to kickstart its Kickstart service, Yahoo! says it will donate $25,000 to the university that signs up the most alumni. However, Gatz warns on his blog that like most all things from his group, Kickstart is a very early stage product and may lack a lot of features. He encourages users to give it a try and suggest improvements.

Also, Yahoo's Brickhouse product development unit announced the new FireEagle platform that will eventually enable people to provide their location in one place and have that information distributed across multiple applications, such as social networks, microblogs and instant-messaging services.

"The platform geocodes the data and makes it machine-readable so other applications can plug into it, publish to it, or read from it," says Salim Ismail, head of Brickhouse.