A bit earlier than expected but always welcome. Besides the traffic, the best thing about TechCrunch is the comments. For the most part, posters are respectful, insightful, and really interested in what you’re doing. Pro/con, we encourage you to check out the post and comments.

In addition, we wanted to engage the discussion (centered principally around audience/data portability/privacy) and posted some our own thoughts. They’re reposted below:

Thanks Mike for the post. Just a few quick thoughts on the discussion so far:

1) We’re not only targeting new mothers, but new fathers as well. TotSpot is neither about mom nor dad, its about the kid. We think thats one of our differentiators viz-a-viz sites like Maya’s Mom, CafeMom, etc.

2) “Social Network” - well, kinda.

We’re actually thinking about this more as a social publishing tool; initially, we’ll be more about giving parents the tools to publish securely about their kids, then we hope to evolve more of the social functionality around that.

@3 made a good point that “most things you want to share with “normal” people without kids who wouldn’t be on that site.”

That’s why we’re going to have multiple account-types on TotSpot and ways in which family/close friends can view and contribute content (so, Max’s Uncle, can add photos of Max if you want him to).

3) A few of you brought up issues of privacy, content ownership, etc.

Privacy is key: Parents can limit their content to only the people they want to share with.

We also make no bones about it, the content you upload is yours. We are big fans of the Data Portability Project and will be doing our best to incorporate standards there and elsewhere. We expect to both make it very easy to bring content into TotSpot from existing web services (Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, Vimeo, etc.), and, through an eventual API, make it very easy to take your content with you.

Update: Digg it. The TechCrunch post has been dugg.