Social Networking by Proxy: Analysis of Dogster, Catster and Hamsterster

Online pet social networks provide a unique opportunity to study an online social network in which a single user manages multiple user profiles, i.e. one for each pet they own. These types of multi-profile networks allow us to investigate two questions: (1) What is the relationship between the petlevel and human-level network, and (2) what is the relationship between friendship links and family ties? Concretely, we study the online pet social networks Catster, Dogster and Hamsterster, and show how the networks on the two levels interact, and perform experiments to find out whether knowledge about friendships on a profile-level alone can be used to predict which users are behind which profile.