Media companies are in a tough spot because creating compelling content demands a lot more subtlety than promoting products. To engage teens rather than merely influencing them you have to get down to the feelings teens share and understand the way they respond to the world.

The hottest media trend in the last few years has been the explosion of hyperlocal content—it has become clear that the masses cared most about themselves and their surroundings.

There’s a lot of talk about teens being “digital natives” because they text obsessively, play video games, and spend hours online. But for teens technology is just another way to maximize their social connections. There’s a lot of talk about teens being “digital natives” because they text obsessively, play video games, and spend hours online

In a recent poll we conducted, we found that more than 90% of the respondents wish that Facebook would help them deepen their friendships in the real world—yet only 40% said it has actually done so. That’s a small but important misalignment.

In real life we jump through hoops for friendship. Facebook makes it too easy. So what real life has, and which Facebook doesn’t have, are barriers to building a friendship. 

Just this year, Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, that using a fake handle online was an example of a “lack of integrity.” In this new social graph, the use of your real ID online has apparently become an issue of moral uprightness — after all, don’t we all want accountability and reliability for every citizen of the social graph?

A more interesting question is whether people are using the social Web the way its designers think they are — and should they be allowed to? For social scientists this is a fun phenotypical question: Give humans a tool and watch it engender all sorts of odd behavior.