I recently read an explanation of successful community websites by Jyri Engström, a Finish PhD student. He describes the glue behind long-lasting community-focused sites as ‘object-centered sociality.’ While we can’t forget the glue in some of the best community sites is finding sex or bargains, I can’t agree with him more. Since day one the glue of Dogster and Catster has had nothing to do with connecting in real life or participating in intrasite games (Jyri calls these ’surrogate objects’, such as vying to have the most friends in Friendster.) and everything to do with simply getting to be near others who love dogs and cats as much as they do.

Even when Dogster was exclusively a post and share site it was surprisingly popular. It allowed for people, on their own time, to show off their own dog and enjoy the mental vacation of experiencing everyone else’s. Members really enjoyed cross-linking their pages with friend’s pages and corraling their favorties, but these features did not include messaging or conversations, just a nice way to say hello without having to get personal. The first big post-launch feature set I added was private messaging. Though popular, communicating remained a clear second to posting and sharing. That was very surprising, considering all the hoopla about social computing at the time.

Dogster grew as an entity and we added Catster, and to both we added forums, diaries and notes. All of these are very popular. There are 20,000 pets composing diaries and in the forums almost 40,000 entries have been posted since we launched them 2 months ago. But when people ask me for stories of romance connections on the site or people otherwise meeting in real life I can’t think of a single occurance. What all our users have in common is their love of dogs and/or cats and that single passion is the core of their engament on the site. Another way to say this is that the sites provide ‘pet-centric sociality’, just like Jyri writes about.

Whether Jyri’s ‘object-centered sociality’ becomes a vogue topic of exploration or overlooked in favor of the next explanation, I know it’s spot on and this is what we at Dogster, Inc. have been inculcating with great relish and know is the heart of what our online presence will continue to be.

[On a side note, it was most pleasing to go to Jyri's web log and see the great creativuty and original design put into it. It's one thing for a pontificator to attempt to write about the most interesting parts of the internet, and it's another to be down there, in the trenches exploring, molding and repurposing it as best you can imagine. At that point the medium is as much the message as is content. It is design like this that make me wish I never started using a RSS reader.]