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theodp writes "Cubby from New Jersey has a passion for peanut butter. Dedeaux from Baton Rouge likes to suck his brother's ear. Spike from the East Bay just wants to kiss pretty girls. Two months after computer and canine geeks in San Francisco launched a social networking site for dogs, 8,000+ pooches have their own Web page on Dogster.com, complete with mug shots, personal stories and listings of likes and pet peeves."
So sad that so many people out there need to get a life. Yeah, those of us with pets love them a lot, but this is a bit extreme... though knowing our twisted society, it'll probably make for the best IPO in history in a few months...
Is there a separate section for same sex dogs?
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
Yes, we know... Napster was big.... in 1999. Then we got Friendster. Now Dogster? End it now. We're still recovering from the e-* syndrome, and the newer iSyndrome is pretty bad, too. Come up with an original name!
Sincerely,
The Owner of eCyber-iSter.com
There is a bakery in my town that sells ONLY dog treats. They are in the shape of cookies, pastries, cakes, etc. But they're for dogs.
It is sad, but if money can be made doing it, I'm sure someone will.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
What a wildly inappropriate slashdot article. Eight thousand pictures of dogs on the internet? Wow, that's really stretching what's possible with our infrastructure in a geek-friendly way.
Dogster. Wonderful. I write an Open Source Social Network program, and Slashdot rejects any sort of story on it only to put a story about Dogster.
Perhaps that's because the owners of this site feel that nobody would care about your web site? Or are you just upset that you can't get free advertising? Not to put too fine a point on it, but you sound like a kid whining because nobody comes to your birthday party. You can't force them to come, you know. If people see some value in doign so, or satisfy some personal need in doing so, they will come.
Yeah, I know, the type of site I'm doing has been done... But then again, does that make Linux "Just Another Kernel?" I'm sure that would be up for debate.
You hit the nail on the head: "it's been done". And done more than a few times. And been done probably better than you did it -- better than I would have done it, too. That's just reality.
But what gets me is that you compare your web page to an operating system's kernel. Newflash: one is important in the grand scheme of things, and one is not. Again, that's just reality. I'm a little surprised that I even have to say that. I mean, your comparison isn't even close to valid. It's like you're complaining that nobody cares about the really nice and intricate paper airplanes you've made, and all anyone talks about is 747's. And now all everyone -- the ingrates! -- is talking about this new Airbus thing. Where's the justice? Seriously, can't you see where your anger is just a little misplaced?
Yes everyone, the ideal is novel
Again, you hit the nail squarely on the head: Dogster is a novel idea. My mom even knows about it. My relatives who hardly use computers think it's just fabulous, and put up profiles of little Fluffy the poodle. The idea has traction, for whatever reason (quite a bit of that reason is being the first to do it).
Yours is not a novel concept, and is probably somewhat played out by now. You're late to the party. Time to look at reality again. If you did "Catster" or "Birdster" or, hell, even "Hamster" people might come. But imagine if you did a Dogster clone. Can you see anyone coming to it? No? Why not? Probably for the same reason that nobody comes to your Friendster clone: it's an already crowded market, with no room for your efforts. That may be sad, but it's true.
But hello, anyone? This is news for NERDS, not, news for dogs. We typically like things like anime, Open Source, Star Wars and SCO. This fits under neither.
Try not to tell people what they like. That's likely partly the cause of your problems.
I'd suggest abandoning the Friendster clone you've done and spending time and effort on something else. You've probably learned a lot from your efforts, so it likely wasn't a completely lost cause. Use that knowledge to make a new site, if a web site is really what you want, only this time find a novel concept. Slashdot, even though it's been copied over and over, was novel when it started out. That's why it's popular (and regardless of what you think about its occupants or its design, Slashdot is popular).
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
It's official: Friendster and Instant Messaging are in a bubble. I swear to freaking god, people will fall for the same crapola time after time after time after time. Remember, people once thought pets.com was a GREAT idea!
It's times like this I'm glad Silicon Valley is being outsourced.
Waste of time, yes, but it sounds quite lucrative for the site operators.
Most of the crap here on the internet is targeted at small demographics, but due to the large geographic market, they can be quite successful.
There's probably still lots of untapped market in the pet oriented websphere. If you are a pet owner who knows how obsessive some pet owners can be, then why not? (note to self: remember this and get to work!)
Too many people here seem to expect the web to remain self-referencial forever, but how many websites about web technologies do we really need? The money is not going to be made off of geeks, rather it will be made off of the mundane, niche-market foibles and obsessions of the common person.
Read, L
So please do not put down pet owners or say they are freaks. You may simply not understand the bond that people have with their animals. I know that I consider Cricket to be my son and when he gets a shot, he reaches for me just like any child would to their parent.
The twisty paths natural selection takes through "problem space" never ceases to amaze me.
Humans are neotenous apes: our maturity is delayed, our childhood prolonged, in order that we can take the years required to train our over-sized brains to modify our environment to our species's needs. That big brain is our only real strength as a species -- we are slower than lions, weaker than chimps, less robust than bears -- and that brain is only an advantage after years of education, years during which the juvenile human is essentially defenseless.
This extreme K-selected reproductive strategy -- K selection meaning that rather than produce many offspring requiring little or no parental investment (or "r-selection"), humans produce relatively few (although not as few as gorillas) offspring that require tremendous parental investment over a period of decades.
Clearly, humans unwilling or unable to make an investment in their offspring will have far fewer -- if any -- grandchildren: or in other words, lack of parental investment in a species requiring extreme K-selection will be severely penalized by natural selection. So humans evolution must either develop traits that encourage parental investment, or abandon K-selection and the big, slowly educated brain.
And so evolution has -- as usual -- taken a indirect course: parental investment per se may not seem all that fun, but what seems fulfilling to humans "just happens" to encourage parental investment: pair bonding between couples who become parents, a desire to have children and a family in the first place, a joy in the touch and smile of the child, the feeling of being needed when the child "gets a shot, [and] reaches for me just like any child".
What's even more amazing about the twisty paths adaptation takes is that these desires are so profoundly inculcated in humans (despite that big brain, it seems that we have more and more complex instincts than most other animals) that when we can't get the fulfillment that adaption has made us hunger for by having children of our own, we'll actually go so far as to adopt children.
Now think about that.
Adopting -- at least outside one's own family -- does nothing to propagate the adopter's genes. Indeed, adoption precludes using those same resources to contribute to a sibling's children -- who at least shares one-quarter of the adopter's genes --, or leaving the person with whom you're infertile, in the hopes that you'll be fertile with someone else. Adoption essentially means the extinction of your particular unique combination of genes -- the end of the branch that is you, after some three billion years -- with all those resources placed at the disposal of some entirely un-related gene line. It's a bizarre squandering of the efforts of your gene line over the three billion years of its refinement from the first proto-bateria through to your parents.
Now consider the parent poster: he doesn't support his sister's kids -- who share one-quarter of his genes. He doesn't adopt a child who is essentially a distance cousin, a member of his tribe. He doesn't even adopt a child from Brazil, a fellow human who at least shares 6 million years of evolution with him.
No, the parent poster adopts three canines -- members not of the same species, or even genus or order -- animals with which he has the same genetic affinity as with any placental mammal.
But that's what's so interesting -- he adopts these dogs not because they are genetically closely related to him, but because evolution has shaped him -- in a uniquely human way -- to need and desire the role of a parent, however he can get it. And evoluti
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