The World is abuzz today with all sorts of interesting news relevant to social media/ social networking.  Here are some teasers with links to keep you occupied with plenty of great reading:

MySpace is apparently the biggest site on the internet in terms of the number of page views.  Fox Interactive (largely MySpace) surpassed Yahoo, which saw a 9% reduction in overall traffic in November.  This is not all doom and gloom for Yahoo. Yahoo still has more than double the number of unique visitors to its site than MySpace – clocking in nearly 130 million unique visitors in November.  If you ask me, unique users is a better judge of website size, but I suppose traffic is also important.  Read More.

Speaking of Yahoo. Today, Yahoo and comScore Networks released a research report entitled, “Engaging Advocates through Search and Social Media.” This is a topic that I brought up in my recent blog “Social Networking and The Birth of S-Commerce: A Marketer’s Dream Come True”, in which I compared the power of social networkers to that of the folks that Malcolm Gladwell calls “Mavens” in his book The Tipping Point.  It’s great to see research emerging on the subject.

Skype is planning to start charging for “Skype Out” calls to mobile or landlines effective January in the US and Canada.  If you sign up before January 31, 2007, you’ll get the yearly cost for these calls at half price – a cheap $14.95/year for an unlimited plan (regular price is $29.95).  If you’d rather get a bill after every call, it’s still super cheap – $.021/min!  Read More.

A new social media website called DareJunkies launched it’s beta, which encourages people to submit videos of themselves executing on dares, which appear on the website. Call me juvenile, but it has the potential to be hilarious.  More importantly, it has the potential to be sticky. I’m not sure what their revenue model is, but I can see huge opportunity for ads, product placement in dares, etc.  TechCrunch calls it “A social networking site for jackasses”.  I won’t disagree, though looking at some of the challenges, a lot of it seems a bit more benign than the stunts of Jackass… more like videoing the dare component of a high school truth or dare game.  Take, the following example, which appears in the dating section:

See how many ridiculous pick lines you can try at the drive though window.  Try your best, your most suave moves, until they get increasingly more frustrated with you.  Finally get upset yourself claiming that “this is the Pick-Up window, if they weren’t interested they shouldn’t be working there.  If they can’t take a joke then order the Big Mac Combo…only if you’re not at Dirty Ron’s. Read More.

And, lastly, MobileCrunch is reporting that SharpCast has been added to US carrier Altell‘s deck.  I’ve been excited to hear SharpCast’s announcement for a while now.  While I’ve not seen the service working, I first heard about it last year when it was very much under wraps, as the company has quite a few folks that came from Palm, Inc./ PalmOne.  The service allows you to sync photos across all of your devices (phone, PC, etc.) seamlessly.  While this is not a social media site or technology, per say, I think it has long term potential to revolutionize the way that users of social media sync information with their computers to their phones and ultimately share. Read More.