TotSpot has been described as a lot of things: “Facebook for babies,” “MySpace for Kids,” “online babybooks,” “digital scrapbooks,” etc. We don’t think any of these shorthands fully captures what we’re trying to do but the one that might be the closest is “MySpace for Kids,” or “MySpace for Parents.”

At first blush, this might not make sense. MySpace is a bit of free-for-all, privacy issues remain, its design is much despised, and the “web 2.0 community” (we consider ourselves sorta members) thinks little of the service. In some quarters, describing yourself as the “MySpace of anything” is like attaching yourself to an epithet.

Writing at Read/Write Web, Marshall Kirkpatrick provides a much needed defense of the company: “the point is this: millions of people use MySpace to express themselves online, MySpace is like their email.” MySpace does a lot of things wrong and much can be improved but at a very basic level - MySpace remains a very powerful tool (still more powerful than Facebook) for people to express themselves to their friends, family, and co-workers. At its core, MySpace is a vehicle for people to say: “This is who I am.”

At TotSpot, our goal is offer parents something similar, the ability to say: “This is who my child is.” Every kid has a unique personality, does things slightly differently, accomplishes things in a particular way, and in non-universal contexts. Just as MySpace enables individuals to express their uniqueness, we want to parents to have the ability to do the same for their children. If that makes us “MySpace for Kids,” so be it.