It’s been tremendously exciting for us to watch TotSpot Groups blossom into a genuine community. While we try to keep making improvements to the product, the real work is being done by our incredibly passionate users.

We want to celebrate and shine our spotlight on those who’ve really taken it upon themselves to cultivate a community on TotSpot by featuring a Group of the Month along with a Q&A with the Group’s creator.

We’re excited to announce our first Group of the Month (June): Working Moms, created by Michelle Gillen. Working Moms was created on the day we launched TotSpot Groups and since then has become one of our most vibrant Groups thanks in no small part to the passion and energy of Michelle.

Michelle, mother of 5-month-old Maggie and 7-year-old Hailey, is a, self-described, fellow “computer geek.” By day, she’s responsible for keeping the Pennsylvania’s 140 state park offices connected to the internet as the network security administrator for Department of Conservation and Natural Resources for the State of Pennsylvania. She’s a quintessential, working mom. Our interview, is below:

TotSpot: The name of the group, “Working Moms,” is pretty self-explanatory. Beyond that, can you explain to a perspective group member why they should join?

Michelle: Being  a mom in general is a wonderful, amazing, scary, confusing experience!  Toss in working AND being a mom and that really makes a challenging task! Sometimes I feel like I’m running a non-stop marathon!  Many days I deal with a full range of emotions while being away from my kids.  With a new baby, I had other things to contemplate such as how to continue to breast feed and how to find someone I trusted to watch my newborn! I felt so alone at times and overwhelmed.
So that said, this group could be a place that we could discuss all of that and more!  Make new friendships.  Find others who have been where we are and have some sound, hard learned advice on how to get through it.  Or as I’ve just recently experienced, when the task gets daunting, share it and someone will give you the boost you’re needing to help you get going again!

(more…)

Since we launched, one of the most requested features has been the ability to quickly and easily share content on TotSpot …with just a link. Friends and family members get frustrated by sign-up forms or passwords to remember, and as a result, miss the beautiful content on your child’s profile.

We’re thrilled to announce EasyShare by TotSpot:

EasyShare gives you a simple link that you can send to your friends in an email, an IM conversation, or automagically post to Facebook, Twitter, or even your adult profile on TotSpot. That link will give recipients access to just that single piece of content (including an entire photo set) without any sign-up, any password, or any hassle.

The EasyShare box (see it in the image above) is now available on the sidebar of any individual content page on TotSpot. Just go to the page you want to share, look in the sidebar, point, click, and EasyShare. Give it a shot now!

As always, we love to hear your thoughts about how we’re doing and what we can do to make TotSpot an even better experience. Let us know in the comments below!

Not quite Bill O’Reilly style, but like many others we’re big fans of the real-time-web and we’re taking our first steps in that direction with some recent improvements to TotSpot Groups.

Now, activity throughout TotSpot Groups is aggregated into a single stream - a refresh button is included to update the stream and at the bottom of page a “More” button introduces more posts “Twitter-style.”  In addition, discovering new content within your groups is easier - the number of new updates since last page load is displayed next to the group name.

To date, we’ve been blown away at the number and quality of both new groups formed and the content created. If you haven’t already, check out some our favorites: Working Moms, Dad’s Place, SAHMs, Mommies United, Parents of Preemies, and more. There is a great community blossoming and we’re just happy to do our best to assist in that effort.

TotSpot is growing as a company, and we’re looking to beef up our team with a Chief Mom (or Dad) Officer. For now, it’ll only be a part-time role, but an integral part of the team nonetheless with room to grow. We’re looking for someone to help with community monitoring (for our new TotSpot Groups) as well as some social media, business development, and marketing efforts. The only requirement is a passion for what we’re doing at TotSpot. Sound like something you might be interested in? Send us a note at hello@totspot.com for more details.

Today is a big day for us at TotSpot. We’ve set out to build the web’s most vibrant community for the world surrounding babies, toddlers, and children, and today, we’re happy to announce the launch of TotSpot Groups!

A community is only as good as its members, so we need your help in making sure TotSpot Groups is as a great a place as we think it can be. Have something you’re passionate about? Whether it’s parenting issues, an existing group you’re involved in, an activity you enjoy, or anything else, we also hope you’ll bring your interests to the TotSpot community by creating a group or finding an existing group to join.

Here are some Screenshots:

Want to give a quick heads up - We may have a few minutes of downtime this morning as we do a bit of sprucing up…

As our members know (per our most recent e-mail), TotSpot Plus is now officially in the wild. Plus users get expanded photo/video storage, access to priority support, and an increase in the # of managers and contributors. If you haven’t already, check out Plus here (login required) - or send a gift to your favorite member (think belated Mother’s Day gift).

In addition, our friends at StartupMeme and SociableBlog covered the launch of TotSpot Plus:

From StartupMeme:

Today, TotSpot has announced the launch of TotSpot Plus.  With this parents get boost to their storage, which has been pushed to 2GB and enabling multiple profiles so both mom and dad can separately participate in creating their child’s memories. They can also add more accounts as contributors, just in case a grand parent or an aunt has the child’s photos or videos. This make the site ever more useful, especially letting parents add contributors to complete the entire story of their kids childhood memories.

From SociableBlog: TotSpot Launches TotSpot Plus : Build a Betty Baby Website

As you might have noticed, we’ve recently pushed live a bunch of little, but we believe, significant changes to TotSpot that should improve the site’s ease of use. Among the most useful is the new friends dropdown, which displays links to the profiles of your five most recently updated friends alongside quicklinks to invite new friends to TotSpot.

Take it for a spin, it should make your TotSpot life a little easier.

Curious about web product development processes? We use Skitch and mark pages up like this all the time:

This is a live page that we hope to be addressing very soon. See a page on TotSpot you think can be made better? Skitch it (or use whatever drawing / screen grab tool you like) and let us know in the comments!

So the title was basically Google-bait, but the real question is:  How can we integrate TotSpot and Twitter?

• Is it as simple as posting (with TinyURLs) your TotSpot updates to Twitter?
• Is it input from Twitter?
• Should we develop some sort of hashtag around your profile?

All thoughts are welcome and appreciated.

Cross-posted at Get Satisfaction.