A recent study into how different age groups use the internet came out with an unsurprising conclusion; young people do not use traditional blogs as much as they use social networking sites. Only 14% of teens now say they blog, while some 73% are enthusiastic about social networking.

The percentage of teenage bloggers has dropped by half since 2006, clearly showing a significant shift in online youth behaviour in the last couple of years. Online tools are both being influenced by and influencing how young people consume media and interact with the world around them at large.

For numerous young people blogging is an activity that isn’t instant or quick enough both in production and reaction, especially for a generation where many have grown up with a pophacking mentality that disposes desire instantaneously. Comments and ‘like’ buttons from social networks and mobile phones relate much closer time-wise to this instantaneous desire. A plethora of opinions on a subject can be found and absorbed in seconds merely by searching through Twitter. The attention placed on the rise of Twitter examples how the rate of media consumption is increasing. Yet it is not only media consumption that is changing via social networks.

As we’ve already explored, Facebook and other online networks are now beginning to have significant offline impact. A shining recent example is the new startup that is to be launched after the Facebook group Secret London amassed 180,000 members. Support for important issues can be found readily through young people who use social networking, the proposed Robin Hood Tax, which is gathering support on both Facebook and Twitter is the latest example of this .

While an actualization of social networks has just started happening recently via offline support for online actions, the websites themselves have started to become more than networks purely within the online space. Facebook recently became the fourth largest distributor of news online, even rivaling Google News. Suggestions are beginning to emerge that Facebook may even become a ‘first go-to’ portal for many young people, John Palfrey recently suggested that they are now beginning to get their news through osmosis and “grazing” headlines their friends link to. Young people generally spend more time on social networking sites than they do Google and search engines, so it is no real surprise that shared content on Facebook surged fivefold in the last seven months. Yet the billion-dollar question still remains for Facebook, about whether it’s relatively simple and enjoyable (in comparison to MySpace) user experience can begin to pay similar money to the amount Google has been making for the last few years. Suggestions have varied from asking that question pessimistically, to thinking of it more positively as a centralizing internet force and to constructing a revenue stream that reflects it’s 400+ million users worldwide.

While there is no clear cut answer, hypothesizing about such things is useful to an extent, but Facebook’s users will essentially decide its future. If young people continue to pour on to it for its simple way to connect with friends, share content and for ‘photos and that’ then it will continue to prosper.

Young people want their interactions with such tools to be seamless and not seem like an effort, hence there are now 100 million Facebook mobile phone users. In this regard Facebook is attempting make itself more vital by expanding it’s guarded gate of social networking to web-based email and redesigning it’s aesthetic to centralize search, in what some see as a direct challenge to Gmail and Google. Google has itself fired a volley over to social media with Google Buzz, it’s a large step towards a Google social network.

Google Buzz blends Twitter (in its layout’s simplicity, follow structure and centralization of the status update) and Facebook (in it’s propensity to share links and photos as well as to comment and ‘like’ them) and is integrated into Gmail’s inbox giving the fledgling network an instant 150 million users. Google Buzz has already received criticism from newspapers, digital experts and bloggers alike. Yet whether it is actually used regularly is very dependent on how many of those become active users to the extent where the tool is weaved into their lives seamlessly. . It’s neigh on impossible to tell whether youth desire for instantaneous access is influenced these web innovations, or the tools are influencing youth behaviour, but with Google and Facebook expanding their (now-seemingly ready for war with each other) services to crossover point the relationship between online tools and youth behaviour will continue to merge, especially as these tools become more mobile.