Toronto Star: Cool cats now have their own online social network
(h/t: IOTW)
By Lesley Ciarula Taylor
Social networking for cats has arrived.
Two tech geeks with a fondness for felines and an eye for niche marketing have created Catmoji, a Pinterest-like website that is wall-to-wall cat pictures, cat videos and cat chats.
Matthew Phiong and Koekoe Loo don’t actually own cats themselves, they told the Toronto Star by email on Monday.
They had previously created the social network Flvrd, a website where users could share any visual content they liked.
“We found out that most of our users share cat pictures and videos,” they said.
“We also like to procrastinate with cats on the Internet so we decided to just focus on cat pictures and videos.”
The emoji (emoticon) part of the site lets users find their favourite felines by emotion: happy, sad, cute or funny. There are kitten pages, genetic anomaly pages and celebricat pages.
And the cats get to like, share and comment on other cats.
Catmoji launched on Christmas Eve with 800 users who post their own images. They’ve doubled that membership in two weeks, the pair said.
“We are working round the clock to keep Catmoji up and running.”
Phiong, an online developer with a passion for startups, and Loo, an artist, were born and raised in Penang, Malaysia, where they studied computer science together.
Phiong did have a pet cat as a boy and Loo fostered a stray who died, which they speculate may be the root of their fascination.
Or, as they said, perhaps they just like “building eye candy projects that bring happiness to others.”
I’m not gonna look at the genetic anomalies pages. That sounds like nightmare fuel to me.
Yes, Catmoji is on Twitter and Facebook.
Tags: social media
