Twittering From the Cradle

[Mercury]

A host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil?Grams and Kidmondo, offer parents a chance to invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives.

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[Lyte]

Okay, this is just creepy...

"Of course, these busy social networkers don’t actually post journal entries or befriend playground acquaintances themselves. Their sleep-deprived parents are behind the curtain, shaping their children’s online identities even before they are diaper-free."

Why would you want to put your child's life out there for all to see?! It definately is "baby overshare!" Where are these parents sense of decorum or privacy for their child... who by the way, let's remember... has no say in this exposure!

Twittering From the Cradle


LITTLE SURFERS Shaun Hallac is born to blog; his dad, Daniel, started Kidmondo.

IT would be easy to assume that the first month of Cameron Chase’s life followed the monotonous cycle of eat-sleep-poop familiar to any new parent. But anyone who has read his oft-updated profile on Totspot, a site billed as Facebook for children, knows better. Cameron, of Winter Garden, Fla., has lounged poolside in a bouncy seat with his grandparents, noted that Tropical Storm Fay passed by his hometown, and proclaimed that he finds the abstract Kandinsky print above his parents’ bed “very stimulating!”

Hailing from Winnipeg, Ontario, Dominic Miguel Alexander Carrasco, 7 months old, uses his Totspot page to share his obsessions with his entourage. His fave nickname? Buddy or Big Boy. His fave book? “Green Eggs and Ham.” His fave food? Unsurprisingly, “mom’s milk.”

Of course, these busy social networkers don’t actually post journal entries or befriend playground acquaintances themselves. Their sleep-deprived parents are behind the curtain, shaping their children’s online identities even before they are diaper-free.

“It does feel a little funny to personalize it in his voice and be connecting to other babies as him,” said Kristin Chase, 29, Cameron’s mother, who updates his page at least every other day.

But considering that relatives clamor for updates, she enjoys being able to catalog 10-week-old Cameron’s doings in one Web-accessible place. “Knowing his daddy, it won’t be long before he’s blogging about himself anyway,” she said, referring to her husband, Nathan, 29. He joined Odadeo, a site still in beta that allows dads to blog on behalf of baby as well as meet other fathers.

Call it convenient. Call it baby overshare. But a host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil’Grams and Kidmondo, now offer parents a chance to forgo the e-mail blasts of, say, their newborn’s first trip home and instead invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives.

“It’s an interesting model,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Everyone can decide how much or little they want to know about a baby, which avoids the situation of receiving a few too many e-mails about someone’s wonderful child, and parents can decide how much they want to share — in minimal or maximal ways.”

But does the world really need online social networking for babies?

A few entrepreneurs and many Web-forward parents think so. As of this month, Totspot has accumulated 15,000 users. Kidmondo and Lil’Grams, both started last year, each have thousands of users worldwide.

“We’re seeing a rising tide of parenting interest on social networks,” said Adam Ostrow, the editor of Mashable, a news blog about social networking sites. “Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of Facebook users are adding their children to their profiles.”

Mr. Ostrow sees parents’ posting on behalf of their children as a “natural evolution” of say, Twittering about oneself.

“We are at a very pro-parenting moment in time,” said Pamela Paul, the author of the book “Parenting, Inc.” “It’s reflected in our offline culture and on the Web. We are all screaming about it at the top of our lungs.”

So much so that some early adopters have become ventriloquists for their children, even those too young to speak for themselves. With a quick glance at a cheerful profile, parents can also handpick their offspring’s playmates much like online daters choose companions.

While pregnant, Erin Carrasco, 25, mother of Dominic, friended other moms-to-be online, whose newborns became part of Dominic’s network on Totspot. And now on Thursdays, a few of those baby friends (and their moms) join Ms. Carrasco and Dominic offline in a group focusing on babies’ health.

Julie Ward, 38, is less adventurous about whom she friends online for her son Dixon. She keeps Dixon’s network restricted to people she already knows offline and uses his Totspot page to capture fleeting moments in his development.

One milestone: He gobbled up his first Oreo two weeks ago. “Even collecting the smallest details helps me remember the overall picture of this time of his life,” she said, “though my biggest concern apart from whether we can print all this out for Dixon in hard copy is about privacy, which so far seems O.K.”

Founders of this new breed of baby sites, for all their networking aspirations, allow parents to choose whom they want to invite to view and share information about their child. Totspot even has a feature that allows users to track who has visited their child’s Web page and when.

Daniel Hallac and his wife Carole, co-founders of Kidmondo, believe that someday children themselves will go to the site. “Our son Shaun is only a year and a half so he’s not all that interested yet,” Mr. Hallac said. “But we have a page on our site for our older son Davide, who is 6. He checks up on it a lot and loves to read his story. Sometimes he’ll say something like ‘How come you didn’t write about my baseball game yesterday?’”

These sites allow parents to create “attractive and compelling versions of a kid’s story,” said John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law School and an author of “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.”

But Mr. Palfrey warns that parents posting the intimate details of their children’s lives need to ask not only who has access to this content, but also who owns it. “Whether or not they realize it as such,” he said, “parents are contributing to their child’s digital dossier. And, who sees that dossier later on may be of concern.”

Not to mention that children whose relatives have traded minutiae about everything from their burp frequencies to the very hour they first rolled over may be, once teenagers, awed — or embarrassed — by the level of detail in their ghostwritten bildungsroman.

Karen Kavanaugh, for one, hopes her 7-month-old daughter will one day find her Totspot page touching. “After all, I’m not raising a baby, I’m raising a woman,” said Ms. Kavanaugh, 35, of Hollywood, Fla. “I want to do that with dignity and respect and not put things online that she may later wish I never had.”