We’ve already shared this news with our communities which is that San Francisco’s SAY Media has acquired our company, Dogster, Inc. and our whole team will be joining SAY tomorrow. To understand what this means for our community and members please read those first.

In this post I wanted to share how we, as a team at DogCatsterHQ, feel about this, which, in a word, is thrilled. Say Media is becoming exactly what a modern media company will be in the digital age. They know the future of media is entirely based upon authentic voices, passionate, engaged audiences, and meaningful brand integration. Dogster, Inc. has been reinventing publishing, community, and brand experience since the day we launched so joining Say could not be a more natural fit for our sites and our team.

Matt Sanchez, CEO of Say Media and I captured on video why this is such a natural coming together.

Here’s another video from Say’s website that explains how they envision what a truly Internet-enabled media company should do:

We at DogCatster HQ love what we do and we love having had the independence to build our sites and business such that they best reflect our customers’ desires. We never expected we would find an equally-minded independent company to join forces with, so it’s a joy being able to bring all the resources of an incredibly successful company to what we do.

To all our Dogster and Catster friends and furmily this sure has been a long time coming. Dogster.com launched in January, 2004 before the term ‘social networking site’ was even used. Digital cameras were hardly mainstream then and most Americans had never set up a ‘profile page’, shared a photo on the Internet or had a friend they met online. Yet Dogster hit 100,000 members in a matter of months. We built our own messaging, forums, and group platforms (because on the web, one size definitely does not fit all.) The company operated in the black before we welcomed outside investors. We grew rapidly yet were able to get back to profitability quickly.

We thrived through the downs of 2009 and released entirely reformatted sites in 2010 that are now welcoming a record 2 million monthly uniques. Permit us an industry moment here: We cared profoundly about our members and visitors before empathy became a business strategy; we were lean before it was a religion; we pivoted back when it was called failing and trying something else; we approved each advertiser one by one when bulk ads were still the norm; and through it all had a seriously fun time doing it. We’re not the only ones to have done it this way, but we kept our sanity, marriages and ethics intact and it’s been the ride of a lifetime.

It is also very important that we say thank you. First, thank you to our amazing, diverse, pawsome communities (who we look forward to serving better thanks to our new pawrents). Then we have to thank our amazing team whose average company tenureship is 4.5 years: Paul Thrasher, Yuko Takahasi, Moss Gross, Janine Kahn, Lori Malm, John D. Williams, Kevin Donato and Lissette Hernandez. We would like to thank all our investors including long-term board member Michael Parekh, Jeff Clavier who led our Angel round and has been with us ever since, and the proactive and resourceful Jeremy Liew, Michael Jones, Brad Feld, Robert Simon and Bill Paseman. We also could have easily taken many a wrong turn if not for our advisors Scott Rafer, Christopher Michel and Mark Goines. And very special thanks to our resident vet Eric Barchas, DVM, who has been with us since woof one.

We would of course like to thank everyone who has ever worked at Dogster, Inc. (over 30 people!) including Ellen Dunne, David Dobbs, Greg Olson, Craig Walsey, and Leef Smith. Some big shout outs to people who helped before there was even money to pay for anything: Arin Fishkin, Patchen Haggerty, Alex Hart, Candace Locklear, Yuko Graham, Michael Grodsky and Billy Sirr among others. And while there are more names then I could gather, a profound geek tip of the hat to the developers of all the open source software that has powered over 95% of our technology stack to this day. Open source licensing and development is the true engine of growth behind the last 10 years.

Lastly we want to end where we started, with our community. Without this amazing group of passionate, caring, helpful concerned people from around the world Dogster and Catster would just be piles of fancy server code and images. So here’s to the future and what we make of it together.

Ted, John & Steven

I’ve been going through some of the archived. Dogster first went viral on Craigslist. Here’s a screen grab I took from CL at the time.

I honestly can’t even remember when there were only 4 digits worth of dogs on Dogster.

Heh! The following day it was a Yahoo Pick of the Day

Once upon a time I considered PR a worthwhile use of time and resources. It still is in general but not for us. We’d much rather put time and passion into making great service, then trying to get someone to print that we are. In MBA terms the ROI of the former is far superior.

So when a journalist does take time to do research on their own, it always makes our day.

[click for full size]

USA Today ran an article over the weekend advising you on which social media sites will actually make your life better. Thanks for prominently placing us. We have yet to meet a dog or cat owner that hasn’t found how our sites could make their lives better ;)

I don’t know if it was the community position you created after I wrote my last open letter to you, or TechCrunch’s deployment of Facebook comments, but comments in TechCrunch have become worth reading and writing to again.

So I just wanted to say that, Mike.

We’ve teamed up with the excellent BarkingDeals.com to provide great product deals to our members every day.

The single biggest problem/benefit of the pet world is that it’s an extremely fragmented sector. There is still a pet store in almost every neighborhood. (Same goes for vets, groomers, kennels, sitters, etc.). If you walk in a pet store you will see dozens of different brands making treats, gear, toys etc. Aside from food brands there are very few national pet brands that are well known, and yet there are hundreds and hundreds of viable pet product business.

By offering these daily deals we’re helping these product companies get national exposure of new (not dead stock) items. And even better we get to offer our members and visitors access to items they need and want at 50% off and more.

Today’s Special Deal

To see the daily deals just go to our homepage (dogster.com) on any given day or sign up for the email.

Here’s the official announcement.

BarkingDeals.com and Dogster.com Announce Pet Deals Partnership

“When we noticed the popularity of economical, group-buying sites increasing, we wanted to offer the same type of service to the pet owner community,” said Steve Watters, CEO of Barking Deals. “By offering new deals daily directly to Dogster.com fans and followers, pet lovers can try products that they might not have tried otherwise. It’s a great value for the Dogster.com community and an easy way for manufacturers to try their hand at social media marketing. It’s a win-win for all!”

Mike, we’ve known each other a long time. We met at the very first Slide launch party when it was still a photo sharing service. (He! Look at Tara’s picture I just found. Note the button ;) But I knew you well before then from your posts on TechCrunch. I alwasy respected that more then just reporting, you gave your opinion. And more significantly if you later realized your take was wrong you would state that. You really did and do want the actual information to be known and understood. You put that first above ego or industry.

For a long time the comment threads in TechCrunch were the Quora of start-up information. Everyone in the industry read the comments and many add information when they had it. People put their real names and their URLs. People met and learned from each other via the comments. Anyone who read it in 2005/6 knows what I’m talking about. It was a large vibrant Internet community. (Eric Marcullier reminds me that there was a lot of hating back then too, but it was worth ignoring because of the overall value)

With all due respect, the comments are downright toxic now and it has been for some time. The addition of threading, avatars, liking, flagging, etc. have not brought the community benefits back. Most anyone with accomplishments or knowledge is not commenting, and why would they? From my peer survey over the last couple weeks, no one reads them. They’re literally just a step above YouTube comments. (Sorry, but it’s true). Your writers get attacked by anonymous cowards. Every single company covered gets lambasted by haters, griefers, and outsiders. And there’s very little to be learned by reading them.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t at all. Here are a list of strategies I would consider employing.

* Slashdot style commenting: Readers can rate comments and viewers can decide which quality of comments they want to see. Set the system to only show above average comments by default.

* Use Amazon payments, PayPal Micropayments for a one-time commenter fee. If someone have to pay $1 to be a commenter, the quality will go up. You could also pre-approve anyone, through soical graph or an intern.

* Get a credit card payment for $0.01 and use the name to verify who they are. They can comment with their own nickname or Internet handle if that’s important, but it’s tied to their real name.

* Block a user that has posted blather 5 times in a row. Or start with 10 or 20. Just don’t let them comment anymore. Boo hoo for them.

* Don’t allow people to post without FB Connect or another OAuth/OpenId service. Or if they do post, show them in a second thread.

* Or just have two comment threads. Those that are validated and those that aren’t.

These are suggestions are not the solution for TechCrunch. (Of course there will still be haters, griefers and flamers, but they could go down to be less then 25%) The real solution will be a significant variation that is highly customized to meet the desires and usage habits of the current TC readership, the goals of the publisher and authors and the owning company.

Let me help you find that blend. You don’t have to give up on have quality comment threads. You just need to revise the engagement for 2010.

Terrence Kawaja’s IAB keynote from May is like watching an information carpet bombing with a bunch of 10 ton bombs dropped at the end.

Terrence is a rock star that has been hugely impactful all over the Industry.

“Terence Kawaja is a seasoned investment banker specializing in the media and communications industry. He has over twenty years of experience as an M&A specialist advising on some of the most significant transactions of the last decade, including a lead role advising AOL on its merger with Time Warner. His clients range from smaller growth companies to Fortune 100 companies including AOL, AT&T, Comcast, CBS, Cox, Clear Channel and Bell Canada. Mr. Kawaja has completed over 100 transactions totaling more than $300 billion in value.”

The slides have an audio track that is worth listening along.

Our lead engineer and designer presented to the PHP Symfony Meetup this week on back-end and front-end changes to significantly increase performance after our site redesigns this summer.

The slides were on Slideshare’s popular page for a while yesterday so congratulations to them! If you’re looking to speed up your site performance (hint, it’s usually the front-end issues you should be focused on) the slides are here:

Apple’s recent updates to Ping – it’s social network built into iTunes – actually makes it something of interest, but they are on course to shoot their entire social effort in the foot. From the above product description it’s clear they are presenting this as a social community, but the product they are offering is putting community second behind increased sold downloads.

This mistake isn’t surprising considering they’re beginners in the field of sociality. They’ve built amazingly passionate customers over the last decade by making astoundingly good product, but they passed up every chance to help those customers socialize until 2010. Their Mobile Me product was screaming for profile and sharing features since 2004, but it’s been relegated to a single-user back-up service. iChat, Aperature, Dashboard, Safari all could have had social components added to them that could have done very well. In the last 5 years plenty of services like Scrobbler and SonicLiving used iTunes song plays and artist lists to help people share their musical passions, while Apple didn’t make a single move to make their incredibly popular cross-platform software social in any way.

Now Apple finally added a way to see what your friends like, what they are listening too and a way to talk about it with them. They also did a good job getting bands to make profiles and post updates to them. Good on ‘em! Though this is something you can get most anywhere: last.fm, rdio, pandora (via FB), myspace and many others. I’ve never really found it beneficial to know what my friends and acquitances are listening too via such services because there more noise then signal for my tastes, but cheers to Apple for finally making iTunes social and I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

But for the love of dog why did they have to taint this new product right out of the gate. Increasing cash flow cannot be such a pressing issue, can it? Why squeeze revenue when the community doesn’t even exist yet? At the moment Ping is not a community service, it’s a social sales play. It’s kind of like Groupon w/o the discounted pricing. Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel like a great, trustworthy, beneficial place to share, because at the moment you can’t share a song, radio stream, or podcast that currently isn’t available through their store. Thus users don’t see everything their friends want to share, just the ones Apple can sell to you.

Another example of their trust tainting is that when recent activity is shown in the sidebar, they don’t show ‘friend added a comment’ updates as they do on the full page view, so all one see’s in one’s sidebar is a friend name, a song or album name and a big button with the price to buy it. Also weak is that while they will truncate the name of an artist and song to 5 or 6 characters, they keep the buy button full size. (see screen shot below). I can’t read the artist’s name, but I can pay $24 for their album with one click. That’s not a sharing community, it’s a community exploit.

This might seem like a reasonable shortcoming for a product maker, who can only release so many features at one time, but if they want this to be a widely trusted community service they’re digging themselves a deep hole they’ll have to pull themselves out of.

The reason they are digging themselves a hole is that networks are built on a quickly trustful environment and yet Apple’s Ping is confusing it’s users with a service that conflicts with it’s branding. Without trust, a user will never know if they are being shown everything their friends wanted to show them or what the network provider wanted to show them. For social networks to get hyper-popular it’s important that the trust and benefit are unimpinged upon. The less trust and pleasure, the less virality and the less virality early on requires that much work later. First impressions count with social networks and it’s 5x harder to get an unimpressed user to come back for a second try then it is to get a first-timer to check it out. So by giving the wrong signals early they are making it that much harder on themselves later.

Heather Gold put this flawed attempt at sociality another way. She said “it’s attempting to harvest when nothing’s been planted.”

So, I’m not saying Apple won’t sell a lot of songs, nor am I saying Apple won’t get the community experience right in future versions, but I am saying that this version is tainted which is more then enough to dampen engagement which is all it takes to hold a community service back from being widely popular.

Here’s the side bar I see right now while listening to music. Who is “Jim,” I really have no idea. What album did “Rick” like, I can’t even tell. What’s the most prominent items seen in the whole sidebar? ‘Buy, buy, buy!’

We tested out tokbox today.

As a free service, we liked it a lot. Does anyone know how to indicate that a participant wants to speak next?

Thanks to Galpert for the tip.