What is It?
Lil’Grams is a real-time baby book designed to make it absolutely simple for parents to capture the precious moments of their baby’s life and share it with their family and friends instantly. If you like to draw comparisons, you might consider some of the names early reviewers have come up with:

  • Twitter for Parents
  • Pownce for Parents
  • Dogster for Babies

I’m flattered to be compared to such well executed tools and communities and hope we’ll live up to the excitement that surrounds all our friends there. That said, we’re also quite different – perhaps the story behind it explains why.

Background

Eleven months ago, I was given the greatest gift imaginable, my son Aiden. It was, to say the least, life changing and has given me a new perspective on many, many things – large and small. Today, I am giving him the best thing I can imagine, a living memory book that celebrates his life and my love for him.

When I first got the idea for Lil’Grams, I was overflowing with excitement and lacked the right vehicle to vent through. As a social media enthusiast, I naturally considered a number of different options before deciding to build my own.

  • Blogs – my first consideration was a blog, but it just felt wrong to me. As someone who’s blogged for years now, I knew that a blog was a lot of work and tends to make you feel bad when you don’t post.
  • Twitter – Twitter, was really interesting as they were lightweight and had an awesome mechanism for notification, but it felt too open to me – yes I know I can make my updates private, but having two accounts was a hassle and more than I thought I wanted to suffer through
  • Email – I was equally willing to consider just mailing out updates as thousands of parents do already but that’s just ridiculous – there’s no real archive.

No matter what I found that could be hacked in one way or another, none of them really got my needs as a parent.

Solving My Real Problems

As a first-time father, I’m essentially a fanatic. If you’re not one yet, or had the opportunity to be around a baby from its birth, you might not get what I mean – so you’ll have to take my word for it (for now). As a truly obsessed person, you tend to want to take lots of notes, pictures, videos and everything else. At the same time, you’re also very inclined to want to tell people all about your bundle of joy.

My Memories, My Way
One major problem is that lots of tools tell you what you are supposed to care about. The printed baby books come with pre-assigned slots for your baby’s milestones. Naturally, these are supposed to be the “big” moments in a baby’s life – but there’s far more than that and no place to put them. Blogs and related tools, while being more flexible, are equally abstract. None of the blogging or microblogging tools understood that the things I wanted to keep track of had special meaning to me and my family.

As a parent, it was easy to see the types of things I was keeping track of. We call these little nuggets Lil’Grams since they are short messages about baby’s life. There are six of them right now for tracking things like growth, foods, firsts and pictures too funny to lose. Of course, we don’t think we’ve got them all just yet, but we’ve designed it so we can add more whenever it makes sense.

Always Ready
When you’re chasing the baby around, time at the computer is a luxury. Many, many parents I’ve met have a physical baby book that they received as a gift. Most of them haven’t completed the book in any meaningful way. Why? Accessibility. Most parents don’t have the book around them all the time which means they have to remember to go back. Unfortunately, remembering to do things like that become harder and harder with time – have you seen how fast a baby can creep?

One goal we had with Lil’Grams was make it as accessible as possible. We decided from the beginning that we would support publishing from as many places as possible. The initial version starts out with web posting only, but we’ll shortly roll out posting from everywhere.

Built in Bragging
Now let’s not kid ourselves – you’re a mom or dad and your kid is the best. That’s what every parent has told me :) Kidding aside, we’re all proud of our babies and we want to share the love with our friends and family. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called, emailed, or physically harassed by someone I consider a friend because I haven’t posted enough pictures of Aiden or given them an update on what he’s doing. There’s no shortage of pride, just one of time.

It’s hard work getting your memories down and even harder work pushing pixels out to friends and family. We built Lil’Grams so that you don’t ever have to worry about telling people (or about annoying them with the details you’re obsessed with). When you sign up, you build your own little private network for the baby and invite them to share in the fun. Once they’re in, they get updates (at whatever interval they want) when you post new updates – plain and simple.

Manage the Media
Not the kind coming after you for pictures of your baby, but the thousands of pictures and videos we take. For example, right now I don’t have a highlight reel of my favorite pictures of Aiden. I have started to put them into Flickr, organized as best I can, but that’s not really giving me the “Best Of” reel in any way.

We tackled this problem by letting parents associate photos and videos with their memories. During this alpha, we’re only focusing on photos and specifically photos from Flickr since we love them and they have the best API. Soon in the future, you’ll see lots more sources for your photos to come from and it’s all pretty seamless.

Two Applications for the Price of One

As we go ahead with this alpha, we’re releasing just a couple of the tools we’ve got planned. Here’s the details:

Baby Book
The Baby Book is your real-time publishing platform for baby’s memories, no matter how big or small. It tracks of all those cool details with ease and keeps your friends and family in the loop.

Shoebox
This is your digital media manager. If you’ve got photos or videos out there (be they in your own account or with friends) we’ll help you wrangle them into one place and rise the cream to the top.

All of our tools are completely private and not open to the general public. I hate creeps and don’t want them any closer to my son than I want them to yours.

Calling All Parents

Today, we’re announcing the start of our private Alpha. We’re looking for excited parents everywhere, though we’ve got a special place in our hearts for parents who use Flickr and Twitter at the moment.

You can sign up in the top right corner of our temporary home page: http://littlegrams.com.

Special Thanks

Special thanks go out to Daniel, Susie, Bernie, Ranvir, Shikha, Arjun, David, all the parents who’ve provided input and to my happy little boy Aiden for not breaking all the keys off the computer so daddy could write this post.

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