Social Networking has gone to the dogs!?

Has social networking really gone to the dogs? Well, it actually has not, because what the title intends is completely different from the actual meaning of the phrase.

As all of us know, facebook has changed things around us in many ways. It has changed the way we interact with our friends, family and maybe strangers, it has changed the boundaries of what 'friendship' might actually mean to a lot of people, it has made people look differently at how gender is portrayed online and some might say it has changed communication all together.
However, what I want to bring up is that facebook has gone beyond all of this, and now tapped in to a new dimension - helping animals communicate! - and no, I am not making this up!

This brings me back to the title of this blog. I got this title from the title of an article in today's Sunday Herald. So what this article talks about is that facebook or a third party through facebook has developed applications for dogs, cats, birds, fish, horses and the like called DogBook, CatBook etc. What this app does is let the dog owners make profiles for their pets on facebook - and these profiles function in the same way as the ones for humans! - and helps them connect with other such users who also have pets for their pets. At first it comes across as pretty ridiculous - why would someone want to give their pet a profile?! But then as I went on to read the article, I realized that those users were actually quiet serious about this.

As this one user said, "Animals are in your life for enjoyment and Dogbook is an extension of that. It's a way to share information and connect with like minded people who are passionate about their pets." Yet this article didn't seem to make any sense to me. Why a social networking site would want to extend their to animals, is beyond my understanding. Because, those animals, who the application is meant for, cannot themselves make their profiles and use them or update them. It has to be doe by their owners. So isn't this just an extension the actual purpose of facebook then? Humans / people who 'connect' with like minded people through this SNS can also use it to 'connect' with other pet owners? What then is the purpose of creating an application which supposedly lets pets connect with other pets?

Another such pet owner who has made a Dogbook profile for her dog says that her dog "Deserves a Doogbook page," Why she feels so, well is only known to her. But for the rest of us, it might just be some food for thought. Do online communication technology developers actually feel / think they can extend its reach to animals now?