The more people I meet, the more I like my dog: A study of pet-oriented social networks on the Web

There has been extensive research into friend-oriented and professional social networking websites, but relatively little work on passion-oriented sites designed to connect strangers around a shared passion. In this study, we extend the work on passion-oriented social networking through an examination of pet-oriented social networks. We address two questions. First, do people interacting in semi-anonymous passion-oriented social networks behave in observably different ways from users in friend-oriented networks? Second, do groups that, on the surface, appear quite similar (i.e. dog and cat owners) use the passion-oriented networks in significantly different ways? Our results show that passionoriented networking behavior is significantly different from that on friend-oriented networks and that despite the apparent similarities, dog and cat owners use these sites quite differently. We discuss the implications these results have theoretically for understanding passionoriented social networking and practically for supporting the human-animal bond in virtual environments.