Is Yahoo preparing a social networking service? This topic has been blogged about before based on a News.com story back in April. It's back in the news again, courtesy of a lengthy San Jose Mercury News piece about the current state of affairs in the social networking world. Buried deep in the story is the following:

And Yahoo, according to industry insiders, is working on a social networking service, Mingle, that it hopes to unveil this year — reportedly with the goal of driving users to its own job service, HotJobs, and other portal services. Yahoo wouldn't comment directly on Mingle.

Interesting…

Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org made an interesting observation yesterday about a new job posting on Craigslist for a Yahoo Marketing Mgr, Personals. In a quick read of the ad, the position summary quickly jumps out:

Position Summary: The Online Marketing Manager is responsible for managing online, on- and off-network advertising and promotion for a new Yahoo! access service.

Since the position is directly related to Yahoo Personals, is it possible Yahoo is doing the next logical step and planning a socal networking service? If so, this could have a huge impact on this growing Internet sector.

Yahoo may soon enter the social networking scene, according to comments made by Tim Cadogan, Y's VP of search. Speaking before a Stanford Business School tech conference audience, News.com reported yesterday that Cadogan addressed

a fairly new feature from Yahoo that lets people in remote locations search simultaneously by using IM environments in Yahoo instant messenger. "This is just the beginning. A lot more will come from that," said Cadogan, a former executive at Overture Services who joined Yahoo when it bought the commercial search pioneer.

With Google already moving into this arena, it would make perfect sense for Yahoo to be following right behind.