More than half (55%) of all of online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

That’s important for all sorts of reasons, the most obvious being that if that’s where they are and we want to talk to them, then that’s where we need to be.  It’s also a strong indicator that ‘online’ is not a helpful channel label – email, IM, conventional web sites and 2.0 style interactive sites are three very different things with different users and uses.