Embellishing their pages

"Nine out of the top 10 teen sites either offered content or tools for social networking site profiles, or were social networking sites themselves," Nielsen/NetRatings reports. The No. 1 site for teen social networkers is PLyrics.com, providing punk and punk-related lyrics they can paste into their pages. No. 2 site is Snapvine.com (still in beta!), which lets social networkers send voice messages via phone to their Web page so friends can hit "play" and listen. No. 3 is WhateverLife.com, providing custom layouts for their social-networking pages. Three years ago, Nielsen, says, the cool sites provided smiley faces and other embellishments for instant messages, now it's all about embellishing social-site profiles. Of course putting all this thought and effort into one's self-image online takes time. The amount of time teens spend online has increased 27% over the past three years. In September they spent an average of 26 hours, 48 minutes, online, up from 21 hours and 4 minutes in September 2003 (interestingly, 2-to-11-year-olds' online time has increased even more - by 41% - to "nearly 9 hours and 24 minutes" during this past month of September). Here's coverage from International Business Times.