Teens Want Personalization. Period.

Sites offering tools to improve social networking profiles with song lyrics, pictures, quotes and layout designs are the most popular for teens ages 12-17. This information is according to recently published research by Nielsen//NetRatings.

PLyrics.com ranked No. 1 among teens, who made up 68.4% of its unique audience. Notably, nine out of the top 10 teen sites either offered content or tools for social networking site profiles, or were social networking sites themselves. Snapvine, which offers a voice player for social networking sites, ranked No. 2, with a 67.6% teen audience, followed by WhateverLife.com, with 60.6 percent.

This is a shift. A three-year shift from those sites offering a selection of instant messaging buddy icons to those providing assistance with social networking profiles and page layouts. In September 2003, the No. 1 site among teens was Originalicons.com, with teens composing 77.6% of its unique audience. Buddy4u.com and Badass Buddy also made it into the top 10 sites among teens three years ago, with teens accounting for 73.5 and 66.6 percent of their September Web traffic, respectively.

The millennium generation had been born with a keyboard. They will be the driving force for personalization. They need everything to be just the way they want it: the interface, the pictures, the music. They don’t need anybody telling them what is right. In the future, as they will grow up, they will shape there homepage with content from the sites they like. Pageflakes is a very good example for that.

Instant messaging is going to be changed in the next two years. The change will come from the combining of two new abilities: personal pages like MySpace and FaceBook with their friends list and with the personality of the users - and mobile phones which will allow easy connection to IM anywhere, anytime.

K.