Dogster.com is an online social networking site for dog owners and lovers. Users can have profiles of their pets on the site, and the site has the usual social networking features such as messaging, comments and forums. The site contains articles of interest to dog owners, features such as Dog of the Day and Dog of the Week, and sponsors various contests and opinion polls. The site also hosts videos of dogs, a listing of dogs available for adoption, Diaries (blogs about dogs), and the Dogster Store, which features products of interest to pet owners. The site is closely integrated with its sister site, Catster.com, and memberships to the two sites are shared. Dog pages can be viewed by searching or browsing the database of profiles, including a local search which returns results by zip code. The site contains detailed information about different dog breeds, and there is a Dog Owner’s Manual, written by a veterinarian, available on the site. Premium members can access advanced features of the site. Dogster.com was founded in August 2004 by computer geeks and dog lovers Ted Rheingold, John Vars and Steven Reading. Ted Rheingold is currently CEO of the site. The site currently contains millions of photos of hundreds of thousands of pets, with hundreds of thousands of members. The site has hundreds of thousands of unique monthly visitors, and is one of the top 5 pet destinations on the Internet. The site has an Alexa page rank well below 20,000. Competition to Dogster comes from sites such as MyDogSpace and Pets.com. MyDogSpace is a social networking site for dog owners very similar to Dogster, while Pets.com is a general purpose pet site with some social networking aspects. MyDogSpace is advertising supported and does not offer a premium membership. Pets.com is sponsored by the Petsmart chain of pet stores and is a free site with advertising only for Petsmart. Dogster has a somewhat cluttered overall look and feel. There are lots of links to different areas of the site shown on most pages. The site is responsive, however, and page loads happen fairly quickly. There is a convenient top menu bar shown on all pages of the site, as well as a left-hand menu pane shown on the left side of most pages. Dogster is a very large site and there is a small learning curve associated with using it. Registration is free and is required to post a dog profile on Dogster. The registration process asks for first and last name, email address, zip code, password, year of birth and gender. Validation of the email address is required. Basic membership is free. The site offers a premium membership, known as DogsterPlus, which allows access to advanced features of the site including the ability to upload more photos and a members-only forum. The DogsterPlus membership costs $3.50 per month or $19.95 per year. A 7-day free trial membership is available. The site accepts PayPal only as payment for DogsterPlus. Dogster is recommended to dog owners and lovers everywhere. For those who are passionate about their pets, it is an ideal place to meet friends with common breeds of dogs and interests. The site is also recommended to persons looking for a pet to adopt, or those wanting to find out what is the best breed of dog for them or their children. The site contains a lot of useful information about dogs, breeds, and dog ownership.

• Users can build a profile of their dog(s) on the site
• Members can upload photos of their dogs for others to view
• Common social networking features such as friends, messages, comments and forums
• Site contains a reference on the different breeds of dogs
• Dog Owner’s Manual available to users – Written by a veterinarian
• DogsterPlus membership includes advanced features and members-only forums

http://www.dogster.com/