On January 12th Dogster.com turned 28, or 4 if you count in human years. Work on Dogster first began in April 2003 (an era cheerily referred to in our industry as the nuclear winter) when I realized that for all the photos of dogs online (and on people’s phones) there was no place to display them along with all of a dog’s other information.

In that time Dogster (along with Catster, which launched in August 2004) has grown from a one-person side project with modest revenue expectations to a 15-employee, break-even business with 550,000 members, 500,000 uploaded pet profiles. What began as a whimsical way to post and share dog photos and stories is now a global phenomenon that supports all four quadrants of the online community experience: information, resources, sociality and entertainment.

What enthralls us, however, is planning where we’ll be four years from now, in January 2012. We very much expect the online pet sector to he huge and for us to be at the forefront. Currently the pet market in the United States is bigger than the music, video game and movie industries combined. ($41B for pets, $30B for the other three). Sector industry leaders today such as iVillage, WebMD and BabyCenter are all eight years or older, and we see no reason why the online pet sector won’t have a comparable presence, which we expect will be us. From that perspective, is the idea of Dogster, Inc. becoming a publicly traded company all that far-fetched? We really don’t think so, and we hope you’ll join us for the ride!

It’s around this time we’d also like to offer birthday wishes to some of our peers. Del.icio.us turned 5 recently; Flickr is about to turn four; and lolcat curators I Can Has Cheezburger turned 1 on January 12th.