The word "convergence" has become a bit of a dirty one in the tech world, thanks to rather crap attempts to take every device known to man and stuff it into a handheld device that doesn't have very much battery life. In the New Media world however, the word might find new and productive meaning.

MySpace and Snocap (alright, so not Napster, it's just made by a bunch of the same guys) are jumping into bed together to provide music ("and maybe more..." Ohh God, that sounds like a midnight sex chat ad on the telly) to the fawning young masses.

The idea is that "if we want to crack the youngsters, we have to do it on their ground and on their terms", meaning that youngens will be far more likely to buy your stuff if it's sold to them on MySpace or Bebo than traditional outlets.

This entry should really be titled "I feel like I'm getting old", but I'm not self centred enough to take up a whole headline to tell you that. The guts of a paragraph will do. The reason? Because I'm so disconnected from this Bebo generation, and for the first time I feel like an old man in the technology world. Kids (I mean about 12 and up) are using sites like MySpace and Bebo to the extent that, like mobile phones, everyone has a profile and is to be found on one of these two social networking sites.

They're using them as cheap text messaging services and putting videos and pictures up on the web thanks to the simple interfaces offered by sites like YouTube. There's a whole debate about how dangerous this may be to said youngens, but that's another days discussion. For now, let's just accept that it's happening.

So I feel old because I'm watching as 12, 14, 16 year olds who would have derided anyone openly capable of switching on a computer, let alone being able to touch type, just a few short years ago; now just about as tech savvy as anyone really needs to be to get by in the modern day and age, if not more so besides. It has kinda crept up on me - we in the tech sector have been observing it from a distance, but it's different to sit down next to a 14 year old hammering away with a Bebo page and six MSN windows onscreen.

Back to New Media Convergence, if you please. Now that everyone in the hard- to-reach young demography is on social networking sites, New Media Convergence can happen. We already see it with, for example, Bebo integrating YouTube to such a simple extent that it's a matter of pushing a few buttons to get a stock video on your page; and just a few more after that to get your own cam/phone/whoknowswhatelse vids online.

Google paid top brass to get to be the search engine for MySpace a short while ago. And now we're entering into direct sales - forget about just being able to advertise to the demographic, how about being able to directly sell to them like even iTunes can't?

The new big growth sector is New Media Convergence, and so long as the social networking sites hold their water as mobile phones have done we'll be seeing them becoming a more day-to-day thing. Mix up mobile phones, social networking sites, search engines, stores, even municipal WiFi and you can see the shape of teenage lives forming around the internet, whether we like it or not.

Congratulations are in order, we've made technology so mainstream that ditsy blonde teenagers are using it in their fumbling attempts to have sex with one another.