AfterTek

Yahoo has decided to help college students reach out and work their way to the career they need by creating a social networking service. This new service was created by a young Yahoo member whose job is to advance product innovation.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company today is releasing Kickstart, the service for college students to tap into a network of professionals willing to help them with internships, job prospects and career advice. Yahoo believes Kickstart will be valuable to young people who don’t yet have extensive contact lists on professional social networks such as LinkedIn Corp. and who use other social networks such as Facebook Inc. primarily to communicate with friends.

Yahoo also plans to release this month a service internally code-named FireEagle that will allow individuals to indicate their location at a given moment, providing data that Web applications can draw on. Users will be able to enter the data from various places, including social-networking sites, and software developers will be able to draw on it for applications.

Yahoo hopes other Web sites and software developers will adopt FireEagle as a platform for handling user-location data. Yahoo has struggled in social networking, notably in the failure of its Yahoo 360 blogging and social-networking service to gain significant traction.

Kickstart and FireEagle are products of Yahoo’s Advanced Products and Brickhouse groups, young units charged with fostering innovative services. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of Advanced Development, said the groups were taking a “portfolio approach,” where they would try many things - the majority of which would likely fail - in order to learn and create successful offerings.