If you’ve been following Yahoo! developments as of late - including the company’s bout with a US Congressional panel earlier this week concerning its collaboration with Chinese authorities in nabbing reporter/dissident Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment as a result – you might have been surprised about its announcement Tuesday of a preview release of a new college-student-and-alumni-specific professional networking website, dubbed Yahoo! Kickstart.

I myself am puzzled about the debut, particularly as it means Yahoo! is now juggling two social creations of recent making – albeit one being more personal and MySpace-ish (Mash) and one more professional (Kickstart) – nevermind that it’s also dealing with quite a bit of residual frustration by some users over its decision to can its Yahoo! 360 experiment. One almost wishes to say to Yahoo!’s newly appointed CEO, “Hey, whoa, one thing at a time, mister.”

Alas, Kickstart might be something the company truly needs to pursue, however, regardless of internal complications. After all, it has so many external forces to contend with that it can hardly waste any time whatsoever. Others in the social networking sphere – from MySpace to Facebook to LinkedIn – are pushing ever so strongly forth into a future of ever greater “interconnectedness,” and Yahoo! would be doing itself a very great disservice to languish any further.

Okay, so, a bit about Yahoo! Kickstart. Like was said earlier, it’s a professional-minded creation, meant to connect students with alumni in the business world in order to better prepare for a life riddled with neckties, red-eye flights, and BlackBerry addiction (if they haven’t already acquired such a freakish technological attachment, the avoidance of which is a rarity for youth today) – and maybe even nab themselves a position at a corporation prior to the turning over of the tassel.

Call it something of a Web 2.0 version of 'Career Recruitment Day', albeit one that takes place every day, everywhere (or so Yahoo! hopes to be the case).

I mentioned LinkedIn and Facebook before to be Kickstart’s competitors, and nothing could be more true. Kickstart, while initially intended for one particular purpose – bridging the student-business divide to make for potentially easier transitions – is in fact an overt attempt to attack segments of LinkedIn and Facebook all in one fell swoop.

Whether it succeeds is something that’s simply too early to predict, but let’s not beat around the bush: that’s the plan.

Looking at the current playing field, Kickstart will undoubtedly be forced to trudge up some fairly steep hills in the coming weeks and months if really wants to get some major traction. (I’m thinking next semester will be when Yahoo! starts to get seriously competitive with other services, as that’s when recruiters begin to travel the academic realm en masse.)

As LinkedIn and Facebook have all but carved out the professional and college markets for their respective selves (granted, there’s some give and take still occurring, but the agendas are more or less out for all to see, and people have chosen their main places of residence accordingly), Kickstart will have a very tough time amassing a population that comes close to rivaling either aforementioned network.

And there’s obstacle that we haven’t even mentioned. It’s name. Kickstart? Kickstart? Really?

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what comes of this new creation.

Let us know what you think of Yahoo! Kickstart. Useful? Unnecessary? Been done? Share your comments!