Screen-agers give Snapvine the love

After taking a look at recent data on kids' Web habits, one of the top-ranked sites among teens stood out: Snapvine.

The Seattle, Wash.-based upstart lets people add or send voice messages to most social networking or blog pages, including MySpace, Friendster and Tagged.com. And voicemail means anything from pre-recorded break-ups and "You've got a booger" warnings, to personalized greetings that people can record on the fly from a cell phone. (To send one of Snapvine's pre-recordings to a friend's MySpace page, it can cost 20 cents.)

What's remarkable is that since its February beta launch, Snapvine has become the No. 2 site among teens, according to research firm Nielsen NetRatings. That means that about 68 percent of Snapvine's audience is age 12 to 17. Sure, site like MySpace and Google will easily attract a larger number of young people, but for sheer concentration, Snapvine could be considered a teen-only hangout.

That reflects two things. One is that applications for improving the social-networking experience (read: goofy emoticons, personal quizzes and voicemail) continue to hit a nerve with so-called screen-agers. So much so that kids can put an unknown upstart on the map within a matter of weeks or months.

The second points to a trend that combines voice and social media. Teen-agers love their cell phones, so why not make them useful to their favorite applications online--social networking and instant chat. Snapvine's investors, which include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, are banking on that mashup.