Since coffee is for pussies and tea is way gay, PepsiCo's Mountain Dew has a new morning soda to start your day off right. It's called Kickstart and it sounds delightful.

The soon-to-be-shuttered Yahoo Mash is not Yahoo's first failed social network. It's also not its second, third, or fourth. It took one whole hand for us to count Big Purple's failed attempts to get social, either through mergers or in-house development, below.

Yahoo's innovation factory, headed by avid conference attendee Salim Ismail and the voluble Bradley Horowitz, has launched another dud, we hear. Kickstart, the recruiting network launched to lavish praise from the likes of Michael Arrington, has attracted vanishingly few users. Stanford's alumni association looks set to win a $25,000 prize for signing up a mere 305 users. At $82 a user, that competes with Famesource's Indian recruitment efforts for ineffective marketing.

Remember that game where you pick an object out of a set that doesn't belong? Let's play! Start with a giraffe, an elephant and a vacuum cleaner. Too hard? Here's an easier one. In response to the growing social-network phenomenon,Microsoft invests $240 million in Facebook; Google launches OpenSocial; and today, Yahoo launches Kickstart, a cross between LinkedIn and Facebook, designed to help college students find internships, job prospects and career advice. The evidence we're not the only ones betting against a big Kickstart future?

Yahoo wants to boost its social network presence with Kickstart, an amalgamation of Facebook, LinkedIn, and alumni mailing lists aimed at college grads. Still in concept stages, Kickstart will usher in Nepotism 2.0 by helping college students hook up with the alums who hold dream jobs. [The Web Services Report]