On Dogster and Catster we just launched yet another purely fun, whimsy-rich widget which could even help produce some deep biological data about the nature of dogs and cats.

We developed a list of the five most common characters types and now let members pick on a scale of 1 to 9 where their pet fits in for each trait. The end result is a personality matrix that quickly sums up who your pet is. See the images for each pet’s trait list. Partner John Vars did all the research. The 5 dog traits come from a couple studies and are considered the standard. He had to put the cat ones together on his own as no one has really done this before for felines.

So far, each new user that has joined since we added it has created a matrix. Tim Barkow of Portland’s Thinkcorps designed the killer little LED widget to display the results which offers yet another fun, unique entertaining item on each pet page.

The best part about this, is that once we get 10,000 + pets doing this we will start getting some decent statisitical data and when we get to 100,000 or even 1,000,000 we could have the single most extensive study of dog and cat behaviors. We’ll create tools to query by breed, by age, by region, weight, whatever and see what is what!

I never thought I’d be the dog guy per se, but this community is just so great, it makes it a pure pleasure to keep offering more fun features as they get slurped up immediately. (Our new custom coded Dosgter and Catster forums already have over 15,000 posting.) And just later this week we’ll be rolling out a killer set of features for our most committed members. The cats gotta stay in the bag until then!