Malak Hamwi wrote a nice piece about Dogster, Catster and the state of social petworking for this week’s issue of Newsweek. You can read an online version at MSNBC. We spent about 30 minutes on the phone so I was quite pleased to see that she got at the essence of the passion that makes our communities so active.

Ultimately, the sites are another way for humans to connect. Owners, who communicate with one another mainly in the voices of their animals, usually wind up making human friends. “We discuss human topics,” says Susan Bailey of Buckinghamshire, England, whose cat is named Bruce. “But through the cats.”