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Teen's Social-Networking Site a Hit with High SchoolTeen Websites
 

Not many teenagers raise $4.1 million in funding at the same time they're learning how to drive. Or attend a business meeting the morning before their senior prom. Or appear on CNBC and then return to school to take a calculus test.

 

This is the life that 17-year-old Catherine Cook has been living since starting the Web site myYearbook with her brother two years ago. For the past two years, she's juggled honors classes, gymnastics, a boyfriend and a startup. "It wasn't that hard to balance," said Catherine, who heads to Georgetown University next month. "I put myYearbook first."

 

Like MySpace and Palo Alto's Facebook, myYearbook is one of hundreds of social-networking sites that have flooded the Internet in recent years, connecting people to their friends and offering another means for them to keep in touch and show off their interests and personality.

 

Today, nearly 60 percent of those age 12 to 17 and 80 percent of 18- to 21-year-olds use social-networking sites, according to a Forrester Research report released in June.

 

The sites each have distinctive characteristics. Mountain View's LinkedIn connects professionals. Berkeley's MOG connects music lovers. San Mateo's Wellsphere connects health-conscious people.

MyYearbook connects teenagers. Taking its cue from high school, it lets users sign friends' virtual yearbook pages, store items such as favorite songs and class notes in their "locker," and battle it out for the titles of "biggest dork" and the "best dressed." As at other social-networking sites, members can create a page about themselves and leave messages for each other.

It's not the only site designed for teens. San Francisco's Piczo, Imeem, Bebo and Tagged are among the sites that attract millions of teenagers, a $195 billion market, according to December's Harrison Group/VNU Teen Trend Report.

 

MyYearbook has the distinction of being founded by teenagers, with Catherine, then 15, and her brother David, then 16, establishing the company in their family's home in New Jersey.

"MyYearbook has felt the most obvious for teens," said Anastasia Goodstein, author of "Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online" and founder of the Ypulse blog. "It's quite successful with teenagers, and probably in many ways because Catherine and David were the teen brains behind it."

The sister and brother found their first investor in eldest brother Geoff Cook, who had started his own online business as a Harvard undergraduate and sold it to the Thompson Corp.

 

Now the company's 29-year-old CEO, Geoff Cook wrote his siblings their first check for $250,000. They used the money to hire Web programmers in India, drawing up designs on sheets of paper and staying up late so they could fax plans to the developers.

 

They made the site public in the spring of 2005, introducing it to their classmates by wearing myYearbook T-shirts. In the first week, it signed up 200 people. By the time Catherine graduated in spring -- not surprisingly, her classmates voted her "most likely to be a billionaire" -- about 350 of her 400 fellow seniors had registered. Read Social Media and Parental Guidance  


      

-by Ellen Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer-

 

 
 
 

 

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