Dogster & Catster

» see dogster.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in 2004 i was a university student splitting my time between a ttnet line at home and internet cafes running counter-strike. a social network for dogs, built in san francisco, was about as far from that as the web got. i heard the name years later. the concept, a myspace page but for your pet, was the kind of pure american 2004 idea that never had any reason to reach ankara.

ted rheingold launched dogster on january 12, 2004, and it was exactly what it sounds like. you made a profile for your dog, posted photos, filled in the breed and the birthday, and wandered into forums to talk with other owners. catster followed for the cat people. it was earnest and a little absurd and genuinely popular, millions of animals with their own pages, and it won a webby for community in 2005.

the sites got passed around the way small properties do, from say media to belvoir media and others, each owner more interested in the old fancy magazines dogster had absorbed than in the message boards. the community kept breaking and getting patched. eventually the owners stopped patching. on july 18, 2019 they closed the community areas for good, the profiles and the photo galleries, and kept dogster alive as a plain advice site. the social network was the part that died.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

dogster arrived right when social networking was being invented and took the format somewhere nobody expected. the profile page, the friends, the status of your life rendered as a public page, all of it worked just as well pointed at a labrador. it sounds like a joke and it half was, but it also built a real community of people who found each other through their animals, which is not a small thing. for a certain kind of 2005 pet owner it was a daily habit.

~ the long tail ~

the brand did not vanish, dogster.com is still there in 2026 as a veterinary-advice site under new owners, which is why the death is easy to miss. but the thing people actually loved, the pages and the forums, closed in 2019 and did not come back. what is left is the content mill wearing the name. from a distance it is a clean example of how these endings really work: the domain survives, the community underneath it does not.

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