Humans for Dogs

The Latest in Social Networking: Dogster.com

I laughed when I read this article, Internet goes to the dogs. Dogster is a social networking site, like Friendster, but for dogs. Before you laugh ... the site has been extremely successful! You can create a web page for your dog with his/her nickname, likes, traits, interests, pictures of course and to complete the picture you can have links to all of your dog's doggie friends' pages! Since January more than 8,000 dogs have signed up. Holy Cow. That's 8,000 people that maintain a web site for their dog ... I guess I'd better get with the picture!

Note that the site is really slow today ... they were featured on Slashdot and they are getting even more traffic than normal.

So that brings up one of my favorite topics ... what different web applications can you think of? I know there's money in dogs, and I've though of specialty dog foods, toys, services, etc, but I never dreamed of a dog networking site!

Dogs can too understand people

Anyone who has ever had a dog knows that they can understand you. An article in last week's Economist, 2/21/04 "Sensitive souls", describes an experiment that proves it. Brian Hare from Harvard University did an experiment where he put food under one of two inverted cups. A human then sat behind the cups and indicated the cup with the food, either by pointing, looking, or tapping. Dogs always got the food. Chimpanzees and wolves didn't do any better than chance. He even tried it with dogs with little human contact. Dogs could read the human experimenter's facial expression and figure out which cup the food was under.

So dogs can read your facial expression, and within reason, figure out what you're trying to tell them. But then anybody with a dog knew that.

Although my experience has been that they can understand lots of words. They just get left behind in the grammar arena. Telling a dog that someone is not coming after you've told them they are coming, is impossible.