TotSpot, the site that we described as a “social network for babies”, has launched in public beta. The site gives parents a way to securely share pictures, videos, and important milestones of their children with selected friends and family.

The term “social network” isn’t really appropriate for TotSpot - this isn’t a place for parents to connect with other people. Instead, it’s meant to help parents share updates regarding their children with the people they know. The site’s founders recognize how protective most parents are of their children, and have implemented privacy settings to ensure that their baby’s profiles are secure. Only invited friends and family members are allowed to view profiles, and parents can actually see who has visited their profile in the past week - a feature that would be creepy on any other site, but is perfectly reasonable here.

Beyond the sharing features, the site gives parents a way to document the growth and accomplishments of their child. Parents can list their child’s favorite things, dates and descriptions for milestones, and keep track of a child’s size using a growth chart. Everything is time stamped, which allows TotSpot to generate an Ad-Libesque story of a child’s life.

Best of all, TotSpot will let parents order physical baby books containing their photos, their mile stones, journal entries, and growth charts. These won’t be available until later this summer, but TotSpot’s founders say that they should be significantly more personalized than the traditional baby books found in retail stores.

TotSpot has created a unique (and potentially lucrative) niche for themselves. The site is very easy to use, and has a simple interface that will appeal to even the least tech-savy parents. That said, they’ll see competition from a plethora of other baby sites that offer similar features, including BabySpot, Bundlo, and Parentricity.

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Ok, it’s a bit ridiculous that social networks for every conceivable market demographic exist. But I’m guessing, based on the success of Maya’s Mom (acquired in August 2007 by BabyCenter) and other social sites around parenting, that New York based Totspot could find a profitable niche.

The service, which is built on Ruby on Rails, just entered private beta. They are targeting new mothers who will create profiles for themselves and their babies, and add other mothers/kids as friends. A key part of the service will be recording milestones like the first crawl, steps, solid food, word said, etc. with text, video and photos. Users will then be able to have books printed with all of this material, for an additional fee.

Profile pages for members will not be available to the public. Users can either open them up to all Totspot members, or just their friends.

The company says they have not yet raised any capital but are currently talking to venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley. Sign up on their home page to request a beta invitation.

And if you have a baby, let me know if you think you’d use this.

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