![\"Ted](\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3255\/3119927309_ddc660b865.jpg\")
It was four years ago, when I first met Ted Rheingold<\/a>. He had just started a company called Dogster, an early example of a niche social network that was growing pretty rapidly. At that time, it had about 200,000 registered users and gotten $1 million in investment from an impressive list of angel investors that included<\/a> del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, Aydin Senkut, Brad Feld, and Jeff Clavier.<\/p>\nOver the next few years, social networks grew like weeds, and not surprisingly, like weeds, were eventually weeded out<\/a>, bolstering my argument that social networking was merely a feature<\/a>. First MySpace, then Facebook and more recently Twitter started to dominate, and some of the niche networks simply faded away.<\/p>\n Dogster, too, dropped out of the bright lights, only to be replaced by other shinier start-ups. I often wondered how the company was doing, and recently decided to catch up with Rheingold. In this video interview he gives us a sense of the state of his company. Here are some highlights from the interview:<\/p>\n Dogster (and its sister site Catster) have over a million dog and cat profiles (or roughly a million registered users.)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n The Dogster network of sites gets 1.5 million unique visitors every month and generates about 15 million pages.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n The company logged sales of \u00a0around $3 million in revenues. It has 14 employees and the company is now profitable. It has about $500,000 in earnings in 2009.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n In the interview, I ask why Dogster didn’t come up with a snuggie<\/em> for dogs, or why didn’t he create Dog town, an equivalent of the super-popular social game, Farmville. Ted also gives me advice on what kind of dog to get.<\/p>\n\n