Tuesday, April 7, 2009

My Dogs have Way More Friends than I do


SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACON’S DOG AND OTHER E-DOG NETWORKING TALES
Toronto Cockapoo Annabelle took social networking to a new species with the introduction of Facebook add-on Dogbook last June. Designed by her assistants Alexandre and Geoffrey Roche, more than 91,000 dogs have personal listings which allow them, with a little help from their humans, to send meet, greet, and pet one another.

Facebook, as you may know, is a place to meet and greet. Surpassing My Space as the college and high school internet networking spot of the moment, Facebook is the sticky cyber black hole that sucked this house into its vortex about eighteen months ago . Lured into building a profile by my son Gavin and his brother-for -a-year, our wild Siberian exchange student, Edik, I found Facebook an easy way to send and receive photos from relatives and keep up with the travels of our foreign student friends, as well as check out the latest postings from LOL Cats. After a year on Facebook, my list of friends is a big fat twenty-two.

Last summer, shortly after Dogbook went live, I posted five profiles for our pups and within a week, they were getting friend requests from every continent. Searchable by geographic area, breed, and name, our Malamute -cross, Cootie Bug was in contact with Rocky Balboa (Rottmann, Norway), Hagrid (Husky-Wolf, Canada), Face ( Rottie, Turkey) and twenty other dogs in a few weeks

Invited to be a friend of British Border Collie Pippin, our recent addition, Boo Radley ( Border Collie-Great Dane) was a conduit for me to the British short coated Border Collie subgroup where I learned helpful breed-specific health information.

One particularly appealing feature of Dogbook is the instant notification feature which allows lost dog information to be circulated instantly to everyone registered on Dogbook. Whether this would be very useful, I don’t know, but a quick check of the “dogs nearby” feature, showed fifty-four Dogbook registered dogs within a 2.5 km distance. Who knows how many people would pay attention to the posting, but I would certainly take take advantage of the service.

Dogbook crested the 1 million member mark only nine months after signing on. Scrolling through online albums posted by their ardent caretakers, it’s evident that this puppy networking spot has touched a warm spot .

If you’d like to learn more about Facebook and its Dogbook application, go to: http://www.facebook.com/home

You can add the Dogbook application after you register for Facebook. For help setting up Dogbook, EHow.com has a helpful article : http://www.ehow.com/how_2154793_use-dogbook-application-facebook.html

When your dogpack is registered come over and say Hi! Just browse for Cootie-Bug, Boo Radley, or Pansy. They like to get mail.

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