Think back to the room you had as a teenager. I was a punk who went to lots of all ages shows so my walls were covered with flyers for different local bands. I also had posters of James Dean, Bowie, The Beatles and loads of pictures of me and my best friend (usually ones that we had taken of each other). This need to personalize extended to my school locker and later to my college dorm rooms. It's natural for teens to want to make certain spaces their own.

This was always part of the appeal of MySpace profiles to teenagers. While adults snubbed the DIY design aesthetic as visually offensive, teens immediately embraced the ability to make their pages their own. They started creating their own layouts, had their favorite songs or video clips play when their profile loaded and posted photos everywhere (on their profile, in comments, etc.)

The folks in Silicon Valley spotted this trend and quickly began developing applications solely for the purpose of putting them on social networking profiles. In the tech world, some of these types of applications are called widgets. All of these different widgets and applications now make up what the media has labeled the "MySpace ecosystem." The ecosystem is made up of sites that offer MySpace layouts, lyrics, video, slideshow applications to display photos, audio applications where you can leave a voice message or recording on your profile, and widgets for reading feeds from different blogs or news sources, games, weather, scores and more. Profiles on social networking sites are the "virtual teen bedroom," sometimes messy and chaotic but very reflective of the teen who hangs out there.

If you check out the photosharing links on the right hand side, you'll find a bunch of the slideshow sites popular with teens right now like Slide. Other popular sites in the ecosystem include Snapvine, Plyrics, Whateverlife, RockYou and Video Code Zone.