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Community Corner

Chatting on Catbook

Pet owners are finding ways to work around Facebook's no-pet-profiles policy

A couple days ago in Chesterland, Wraith was online mourning the loss of his littlest brother, Meko, to heart failure, while his other brother, Caleb, tried to catch the bugs on the screen door.

"I'm a great Hunter," Caleb typed before going to sleep "with Mama" and saying goodnight.

Wraith is gray Tabby-Bombay mix; Caleb, a British Bombay mix. They're brothers on Catbook.

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Facebook won't allow you to create a profile for your pet. Personally, I'm glad.

Still, the thought crossed my mind this week - does social networking exist for quirky pet owners? - and so I did some searching.

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Turns out that Dogbook, created in 2007 by a father and son from Toronto, famously racked up more than 700,000 pooch profiles in its first three months, and today counts just short of 118,000 monthly active users.

Given the proliferation of social media in our lives, this shouldn't surprise us. See: Catbook, Horsebook, Ferretbook, Rodentbook, Fishbook, Birdbook and, last but certainly not least, My Babybook as other examples.

Accessed through owners' Facebook pages, these apps allow for the creation of pets' profiles with their names, birthdays (and/or "loved since" year), favorite activities and pictures. Creators can post their pet profiles to their own profiles or keep them a deep, dark secret from their friends.

Upon learning this, and morbidly curious, I quickly created a Catbook profile for my cat Muppet and searched for other cats within 15 miles of our home.

That's when I found Wraith and Caleb.

Endearing or unsettling, to read fake status messages from a stranger's cats, and to be able to cyber-pet my own? Undecided, I went back to Google to find a statistic to round out my opinion.

In 2011 a study commissioned by pet insurance company PetPlan found that one in 10 pets in the United Kingdom have a profile on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, and more than half of owners there share photos of their pets online. Something tells me a survey in the U.S. wouldn't be too far off.

Fan pages are a whole 'nother animal. Take Boo, an adorable Pomeranian with nearly 1.4 million "Likes" on Facebook, or Twitter's @Sockington, who deserves each and every one of his 1,481,994 million followers.

("NO DON'T LEAVE THE TV ON AND GO OUT totally hate this show." I mean really, how does he do it?)

Deleting Muppet's Catbook, I think I'll stick to faces and face-to-face petting.

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