SAY Media has acquired Dogster Media, the company that runs Dogster.com and Catster.com. Dogster is a social network for dog owners to create a profile for their pet. Catster is the same concept for cats. Dogster receives about 2 million unique visitors per month.

Ad network VideoEgg has announced that they are acquiring marketing and blogging company Six Apart. Six Apart and VideoEgg will combine businesses and rename themselves to Say Media.

Blog platform company Six Apart has acquired NaturalPath Media, an online conscious lifestyle and sustainable advertising company. Six Apart plans to use NaturalPath Media’s help to target the 25+ women demographic according to TechCrunch. The details of the acquisition were undisclosed, but Six Apart says now they will reach an audience that is close to 90 million unique visitors. [TechCrunch]

One of the reasons why Tr.im decided to initially shut themselves down is because of the monopoly that Bit.ly has for URL shortening services.  Twitter and TweetDeck both use Bit.ly as the default URL shortening services.  Now Google, TypePad, and CBS has embraced Bit.ly for shortening the URLs of their content.

One of the reasons why Bit.ly has become the preferred choice for URL shortening is because of their constant service upgrades.  Last month Bit.ly started to track what links are malicious in content and warns users before sending them to the link.

Within the last few weeks, Google added Bit.ly to Google Reader’s “send-to” feature.  This feature allows anyone using Google Reader to send Bit.ly links on Twitter to their followers.

TypePad added a feature that generates Bit.ly links on Twitter for new blog posts.  Bit.ly statistics have also been added into TypePad’s dashboard.  All TypePad users will see this feature integrated by this fall.

CBS is also launched a new service called cbs.bit.ly.  This service tracks the URLs on CBS’ website that has been shortened and tracks how many people clicked on the shortened links.

John Resig of Mozilla also designed a Retweet button using the Bit.ly JavaScript API.

Facebook has hired David Recordon.  Recordon was the Director of Corporate Development at Six Apart.  He spent two total years at Six Apart.  Recordon made the announcement about joining Facebook on his blog.

“So yeah, it’s true. Next week I’m excited to join Facebook’s engineering team as the Senior Open Programs Manager and will continue focusing on open source and open standards,” wrote Recordon.  “I haven’t started yet, so I’ll keep it light on the details until I’ve really started to dig in.”

Recordon was essential for the development of OpenID, the login system used by a plethora of web services and social networks.  This announcement is consistent with the announcement that Zuckerberg plans to aggressively hire 50% more employees this year.