I was recently riding in a bus back to a conference with a handful of youth marketers discussing what the next big thing will be with teens and technology. One woman said she believed that teens would be meeting other teens from all over the world online...and I disagreed. She was comparing the teen experience to the adult internet dating experience, and while some teens do meet new friends online (including girlfriends and boyfriends), they are the minority. The Pew Internet & American Life Project's latest report on teens and social networking backs up other recent research like the last week's MySpace study and research on the meaning of virtual friendship from Harris Interactive. In a nutshell, the research affirms that for most teenagers, social networking sites are a way to extend and enhance their existing offline friendships.

Hear's a nice summary from a BBC article about the report:

The study for the Pew Internet Project involved 935 teenagers and found 55% of American youths aged 12-17 had accounts at sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

It found that the sites were more popular with older teenage girls who tend to use them to keep in touch with their existing friends.

By contrast, boys were much more likely to use the sites to find new friends....

The Pew research suggests that these sites were most popular with girls aged 15-17 as 70% of those questioned said they had an account at one or more of the social networking sites. By contrast only 54% of boys aged 15-17 were such keen users.

Some teenagers are avid users of the sites and 48% of those interviewed said they visited the sites on a daily basis and 22% said they looked at the sites several times a day.

Researcher danah boyd posted an interesting analysis of this report on her blog as well. One insight that struck me was:

"Not surprisingly, boys are more than twice as likely to use these sites to flirt than girls (29% vs. 13%). Boys are also more likely to use these sites to make new friends than girls (60% vs. 46%). I have to say that this makes me really sad. This is probably not about boys being more interested in meeting people than girls, but about girls being the subject of most of our fear around strangers. I remember watching 1950s movies about fathers not letting their daughters out while their sons could do whatever. I suspect that we have similar gendered limitations on our children's internet usage. We allow our sons to talk with whoever, but tell our daughters that everyone they meet online is bound to be a perfecrt. Perhaps it's rational, perhaps girls are more at risk, but perhaps it is our fear of them that puts them more at risk."

What I would add to this analysis is that I think other aspects of traditional gender roles are at play here, too. For example, J Mac, one of the teens on MySpace I interviewed for Totally Wired was extremely active in a Volkswagen group, sharing photos of his car with other Volkswagen devotees. He was also the leader of the Class of 2006 group. I'm guessing most of the other people in the Volkswagen group were not teens from his school. I think that boys tend to have more hobbies and be more interest driven while girls tend to be more relational/social. Think about how there are no general teen magazines for boys yet there are sports magazines or video gaming magazines that lots of teen boys read. So more boys may be on social networking sites talking about their cars or their computers or favorite video games with strangers than girls.

Finally, Pew also reconfirmed that the awareness of what it means to be public has taken hold after the past year of media coverage, cops in the classroom and parents and teachers talking to teens about keeping their personal information private. Sixty-six percent of teens have chosen to make their profiles viewable only to their friends...that are most likely the same friends hanging out on your sofa watching TV after school.