The NY Times realizes that teen girls are driving social media:

Research by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the result of focus groups and interviews with young people 13 to 22, suggests that girls’ online practices tend to be about their desire to express themselves, particularly their originality.

“With young women it’s much more about expressing yourself to others in the way that wearing certain clothes to school does,” said John Palfrey, the executive director of the Berkman Center. “It ties into identity expression in the real world.”

That desire is never so evident as when girls criticize online copycats who essentially steal their Web page backgrounds and graphics by hotlinking (linking to someone else’s image so it appears on one’s own Web page). Aside from depleting bandwidth, it is the digital equivalent of arriving at a party wearing the same dress as another girl, Professor Palfrey said.

People building social media and social games need to think about their teen girl strategy; as I have noted in the past, it is no accident that Typhoid Mary was a woman.

Bret Terrill has posted a chart of the demographics of the top 10 games in Facebook. He notes:

Despite all the recent posturings by Zynga and SGN, neither companies has more than one game in the top ten. That honor goes to Blake Commagere.

Most games, with one exception, have a significantly higher ratio of male players. Does this mean men play more games? Answer: No. It means that no one is making games that appeal to female players - I’ll post on that in the future.

Interesting bits:

* Jetman has virtually no users over 26.
* Scrabulous (and Vampires!!!) has an equal male-female ratio.

The other interesting point is that all the games skew pretty young, even relative to Facebook’s audience. The stereotypical casual gamer is a middle aged woman, so this is a bit of a deviation from the expectation.

See his post for the chart and details.