DailyTech reports that Yahoo is looking to muscle its way into the social networking game by purchasing some social networking companies — although Yahoo’s not saying which companies it’s actually looking to purchase.

According to Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s CTO, “I can guarantee you there will be some acquisitions, and we will do some stuff in-house.” Yahoo’s also not doing so hot financially. According to the article:

Yahoo’s profits are down, as are most search companies in the current economy. Yahoo earned $118 million in the first quarter of 2009, a drop of 13% year over year with sales totaling $1.58 billion.

While the article points out that Google has overtaken Yahoo as the destination of choice for people conducting web searches, one and a half billion dollars of sales still gives Yahoo quite a bit of weight in the search arena, right?

I’m not sure how a presence in the social networking sphere is going to help Yahoo at this point. While it may lend Yahoo some credibility in terms of social networking, there doesn’t seem to really be a real plan as to how that social networking presence is going to translate into increased profitability.

According to DailyTech, “Yahoo feels that its high number of users gives it an edge in social networking and that it can swiftly launch and build out a social networking backbone with ‘tuck-ins’ of interesting products that are being developed by other firms.”

Admittedly, building a user base is a tough thing to do — but is Yahoo’s user base really going to be interested in social networking (I’m not saying they’re not, it just seems to be a fairly tenuous assumption)? Usually, when companies act with the intention of monetizing their user base instead of acting with the desire to provide a useful service (and as we all know, social networking sites are a dime a dozen), spectacular failures result.

Balogh goes further to say that “for how many incredible applications we could have and should have, for all the experience on Yahoo, we are terribly under-represented.”

That’s a pretty bold statement, when you’re essentially talking about vaporware — couldn’t any company say they are under-represented in terms of what they could have? Yahoo’s starting to come off as a bit desperate here — and looking to cash in on your user base with applications you could have starts to sound like a company that’s already reached its high water mark, rather than one who’s trying to build a social networking presence.