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.

For those, and surprisingly there were a few e-mails, interested in talking more about status updates, I thought it a good idea to link over to a recent Mashable piece that provides a brief history of the status update.

In an insightful interview with the LA Times, Twitter’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey, explains that Twitter found its origins in the notions surrounding vehicle dispatch, and that “it was when Dorsey saw these systems through the eyes of the social, mobile Web, where anyone can squawk from anywhere, that Twitter’s Big Idea was born.”

Dorsey explains that instant messenger was, in fact, at the core of the initial ideas around Twitter (evolving in name from Stat.us to twittr, and then finally to Twitter). “This aspect where you can just locate your buddy list and at a glance locate what your friends are up to, or what they say they’re up to. I found the same parallels in dispatch — here’s a bunch of ambulances and couriers reporting where they are, and here’s my friends.

Required reading, no.  Kinda intersting, yeah.

We always want to make sure that we’re providing the absolute best experience possible for parents looking to chronicle and share about their babies, tots, and children. There’s no better way of holding our feet to the fire than letting you know about some of the other options out there for creating baby websites, sharing family photos & videos, and more.

We’ll update this post on an ongoing basis with links to pages that specifically compare our service to a competitor. Wherever possible, we’ll try to highlight what we’re doing differently to stay ahead of the curve. If there are certain things you like about other sites that we don’t offer, we’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.

Babysites - Baby Websites Compared [4/9/2009]

BabyJellyBeans - Baby Websites Compared [4/9/2009]

TotSites - Baby Websites Compared [4/23/2009]

One thing that has certainly taken us by surprise has been the volume of Status Updates created. Initially, we included status updates almost as afterthought - a sort-of why not? feature and we didn’t expect too much of it. It turns out, however, that Status Updates have become one of our more popular content creation tools. I imagine this is the result of Twitter’s mainstreaming the input medium and ease of use - it’s just really simple to do.

To make things even easier, we now enable you to update your child’s status directly from their profile. Beneath the basic information box on your child’s profile is a Status Update field where you can share your latest 160-character missive.

When visiting the profile of a friend’s child, that box is now the Wall Post field:

In both cases, your message is directly included in the child’s stream - making a quick and painless process even easier and more dynamic.

So go ahead, say something interesting :).

Our last post (before this one) is now nearly a month-old and its looming presence at the top of our blog suggests the question: Where have we been?

It’s not an unreasonable query. For the past few months, we’ve pretty internally absorbed making changes (mostly unseen to the app) that should put us in a great position to move forward and build a number of cool new features in the weeks and months ahead. It’s no excuse for not posting (although Mike’s been pretty on top of our Twitter) - but at least it’s the start of an explanation.

The posting and communication from us should pick up again and we hope that we continue to hear from you.

All the best, happy spring - Adam.

A tweet from a user today and the recent brouhaha over Facebook’s Terms of Services inspired us to reiterate for you all our total and undying commitment to DataPortability. We have a “Your Kid, Your Content” policy, and we intend to back that up in increasingly powerful ways over time.

So far, here are a few steps we’ve taken to give you total control over your content on TotSpot:

• Download Originals. We are one of the only social media sites out there that allows you to re-download or “take back” your photos and videos in their full original quality.

• RSS Feeds. We give you RSS feeds of the updates to your child profiles. RSS is both a simple way to keep track of updates (for yourself, friends, or family) and also a foundational building block for the “open” web. To get the RSS feed from your child’s profile, simply click on the RSS link in your browser’s address bar (see this screenshot as an example).

• Our API. We have a robust API that gives web developers (like our friends at Pikchur) unlimited flexibility in creating ways to export, remix, or otherwise refashion your content on TotSpot.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for us in terms of our commitment to DataPortability.

As always, Twitter is a great way to reach out and contact us. Follow us @totspot.