John Battelle writes about a new social networking site called FanPop today.

"Fanpop brings together features I don’t remember having seen aggregated elsewhere: If anyone has seen this all before—please let me know—because I’d be interested in comparing. (And yes, there is a Search Engines spot.)"

I took a look at FanPop and liked what I saw.  For one thing - when your trying to do Buzz Marketing, Viral Marketing, etc, you need to find people who are passionate about the topic your trying to go Viral about.

"Users can create topical federations on just about anything, giving it a resemblance to Tribe’s flexibility. With 24 broad ‘channels’, Fanpop leaves room for communities to cluster around a long tail of interests. In the Fanpop spots, users can add links to relevant websites or news links, like Delicious. But in addition, submitted websites gain momentum from user voting— giving Fanpop the interactive push of Digg and Reddit.

For search fans, there’s the built-in "more on the web" option of out-bound searches keyword tied to the Fanpop title page you’re on, to Google, Delicious, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, YouTube—probably a list that will grow.

Fanpop also offers forums— which delicious lacks, and presents them in a more central way than Digg. It also has an internal messaging system — a feature not offered on Digg and in a more developed version than in Delicious or MySpace. "

I’ll try to take a closer look at FanPop soon, and post about it here.