Cubby from New Jersey has a passion for peanut butter. Dedeaux from Baton Rouge likes to suck his brother’s ear. Spike from the San Francisco Bay area just wants to kiss pretty girls.

Two months after a group of self-described computer and canine geeks in San Francisco launched a social networking site for dogs, thousands of furry ones have their own Web page, complete with mug shots, personal stories and listings of likes and pet peeves.

The online site, called Dogster.com, went live Jan. 12 with fewer than 100 dogs. As of early March, there were more than 8,000 dogs posted on the site. Dogs are added daily.

Online networking, one of the fastest-growing segments of the Web, attracts millions of dollars in venture capital and millions of users angling for a personal or professional connection. Dogster connects friends of dogs.

“It’s all about love of dog,” said Dogster founder Ted Rheingold, a 33-year-old dot-com survivor who spends his days building Web applications for corporate clients and weekends creating his own, more whimsical sites.

The popularity of Dogster reflects a more tail-wagging, egalitarian era of the Internet today, Rheingold believes. He wants to keep the site folksy and focused and is not seeking venture capital. Instead, he hopes merely to recoup out-of-pocket expenses, such as the $200-a-year Web-hosting fees.

After creating a photography site and a digital art gallery, Rheingold settled on something less cerebral, more emotional: dogs.

“People love their pets, and we’ve made it really easy for them to make a Web page for their dogs and share it with other people,” Rheingold said.

A few Dogster users have tried to crash the canine party. Rebels have posted pictures of pet iguanas, human relatives and close-up images of the wrong side of the dog. Rheingold, who removes such infringements, is determined to keep the site dog-specific and family-friendly.

Dogster.com