Facebook with whiskers

His profile is like any other. He looks handsome in his headshot, resting one arm on the other as his green eyes look straight into the camera. His interests — sleeping in the daytime and playing at night — are typical of most young males.

But with 853 friends and counting, Fitch is one of the most popular felines on Catbook.

The site, rolled out in June with companion Dogbook, is one of the new applications on Facebook, the country’s second-most popular social-networking hub. Pet owners are able to create online profiles for their furry companions, add photos and befriend other pets as well as human Facebook users.

A father-son duo came up with the idea for a pet version of Facebook in the winter.

“I had noticed on my son’s Facebook that friends of ours had posted pictures of a dog as if it was a person, and I thought that was kind of interesting,” said Geoffrey Roche, 54, of Toronto.

In the spring, Facebook invited users to customize the site by building their own applications. Mr. Roche’s son, Alexandre, 21, built Dogbook and Catbook in a week. The sites have attracted more than 570,000 users in less than three months.

“It really is amazing,” said Mr. Roche, an advertising executive who has since invested in the sites and hired two employees to handle technical questions from users and help design future upgrades.

Facebook ranks as the 10th most popular Internet site in the U.S. and represented 1.08 percent of all online visits last week, according to Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Hitwise. The number, though “pretty huge,” is about one-sixth the traffic of social-networking leader MySpace, which captured 5.8 percent of online visits last week, Mr. Tancer said.

Facebook’s traffic has grown 14.6 percent since the company’s decision in May to let users create applications. Catbook and Dogbook are two of more than 3,000 applications on the site. Others allow users to add video clips, list their travel destinations, favorite books or songs, current mood or horoscopes.

“It really inserts a hyper-innovation culture into Facebook,” Mr. Tancer said of the opportunity for anyone to develop their own programs. “To really take off in the [social-networking] space requires innovation.”

Any Facebook user can add Catbook and Dogbook and make a profile for a pet. Profiles can include a primary photo with room for additional photos, as well as breed, sex, age, hometown, activities and favorite treats.

Like regular Facebook, pets can ask to be friends with other pets, which can approve or reject the request. Dogs can be friends with cats and vice versa. Users can “stroke” a cat or “pet” a dog, by clicking on its profile.

Mr. Roche credits the spread of Catbook and Dogbook to the tendency of pet lovers to take “ownership” in their pets’ online identities. A perusal of Fitch the cat’s “wall” — the place on a user’s profile where “friends” can write public messages — reveals the lengths to which owners will go to stay in character.

“You are so slender and sleek,” wrote Casper, a white Turkish Angora who lives in Vancouver. Hector, an orange tabby from Toronto, put it more directly: “Fitch, you’re the best looking cat on Catbook.”

Fitch’s owner, Remy Osman of Vancouver, said he isn’t surprised by the one-year-old Bengal’s stardom.

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