Remember the Peanut Butter Manifesto? That was the less-than-subtle memo sent out by Yahoo's senior vice president, Brad Garlinghouse, which was subsequently (and some might say, intentionally) leaked. Among other things, it complained that the company was spreading itself far too thin. Between in-house projects and acquired properties, there were several instances of overlap in properties that fell beneath the wide Yahoo! umbrella.
With the recent launch of Kickstart, it's clear that Yahoo! isn't the sort of company that takes its cues from internal memos named for popular food spreads, which goes far to explain the lack of impact of Yahoo! Australia's Vegemite Letter.
The company launched the social networking site Mash a little over a month ago. Mash is a pretty slick-looking site, but beyond that, didn't seem to offer all that much in the way of innovation. That probably goes a long way toward explain why we haven't heard much about the site since then.
Kickstart is Yahoo!'s second social networking site since Yahoo! 360 was deemed a failure--Yahoo! itself acknowledged this fact in the middle of last month by announcing that it would be abandoning 360 for the already launched (well, in beta) Mash. Granted, Kickstart isn't exactly a direct competitor to Mash, in that the site has a far more nichey game plan, targeting college students and recent graduates who are seeking jobs.
The site connects these students and grads with alums from the same college. You can use the site to search for or posted jobs. In that respect, it's more of a competitor to the recently relaunched LinkedIn. I've played around with Kickstart a bit, and so far I can't really figure out how Yahoo! expects to set it apart from the well-established competition.
The smartest thing that Yahoo! can do in these heady post-Google days is to introduce smooth integration between its apps, beyond the recently beta-ed My Yahoo! Introducing Kickstart as a feature of Mash (hell, or even a Facebook plug-in) would have been the right way to go. Of course, it's not too late to go that direction.
After abandoning 360 users and asking people to sign up for Mash back in September, it seems like a bit much to ask for users to join yet another Yahoo! branded social network a month and a half later.
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