One of the great things that has been a by-product of building TotSpot has been the opportunity to plug ourselves into the parent blogging community. It’s a remarkable group of people. We’ve been blow away by the devotion of individual bloggers and strength of the community that has developed.
This weekend saw this online community go offline. 13 DC Metro Mom bloggers braved the heat and together completed the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. Events like this help remind us that best online communities help bring people together to do good things in the real-world. As we continue to build TotSpot, we will do our best to always keep this in mind.
Congrats to Leticia and the D.C. Metro Mom bloggers. You can read more about their experience at Tech Savvy Mama and you can donate to the Susan G. Koman Foundation (through D.C. Metro Mom bloggers) here.
With a web application like TotSpot, you’re never quite ‘done.’ We’re committed to making TotSpot the best place to share the story of your child online, and that means, continual self-improvement. We’ve been working through the weekend in response to your feedback.
Here are just a few of the things we’ve updated:
- We’ve added ‘reply-to’ email addresses to invitation and friend requests emails, making it easier to get in touch and verify the identity of individuals who want to connect with you through TotSpot.
- A new dedicated ‘email confirmation page’ should make it easier for users to complete their registrations.
- We now list the year next to each of your ‘Firsts’
- Entering a middle name is no longer mandatory (and never should have been - sorry!)
- If a user receives two invitations to TotSpot and accepts one, the second invitation (and third, etc.) is now automatically converted into a friend request (what we internally referred to as our ‘grandparent bug’ because it affected a few of our grandparent users)
- Issues with importing Flickr photos from non-Flickr Pro accounts have been resolved
- An error with importing photos from certain Picasaweb accounts has also been corrected
- A few errors in indicating gender throughout the site were corrected
- The hair / eye color pickers now work more smoothly, and the tooltips no longer refer to ‘Max’ (Adam and I both have a baby cousin, Max!)
- Finding out photos you’ve been tagged in has been improved
- Several other minor fixes!
Thanks to all of you who’ve taken the time to get in touch, point things out, and make suggestions!
Stay tuned for many more updates coming soon. As always, if you have feedback, get in touch either by
email,
twitter, or through
our new GetSatisfaction site, which we’ll be integrating into our site more closely over time.
We have some news:
As of a few minutes ago this morning, TotSpot is now open for any parent to register.
Open doesn’t mean finished. TotSpot is still (and always will be) a work in progress. As good as (we think) TotSpot is today, it will only get better in the coming days and weeks.
To all our beta testers, an enormous thanks. You’ve been supportive, interested, and, most importantly, honest. It is your feedback that has guided us over the past 8 weeks and it is your feedback that will continue to guide us in the future. Thank you.
To members of the media, bloggers, friends with twitter accounts: We’ve set up a special social media release containing all there is to know about TotSpot, the team, product, and more. If you’d like access to that page or if you want to talk to the team - please shoot us a note at media [at] totspot [dot] com. We’ll do our best to be as responsive as possible.
Thanks,
The TotSpot Team
Update - Here’s the official press release
