Monday, February 4, 2013

Announcing BratBliss

Every year, my friends that are parents start panicking sometime between February and May (actually this includes me too). They start panicking when they realize that summer is just around the corner and that they have to plan their kid's summer activities. Summer vacation in the US has roughly 10 weeks and each week has to be painstakingly planned, whether it be a summer camp, activity, vacation, play date, summer school etc.

There are generally two techniques my friends & I use to solve this problem. First we talk to other friends trying to figure out what they are doing. This is preferred technique yet incredibly manual. Either you have to call friends, email them, or ask them questions at a party. I'm personally not comfortable discussing my kids plans on a semi-public site such as Facebook or Twitter. The second technique is to research summer camps on websites and parents magazines and sign up kids. This is less preferable of the two because i) my kids may not know anybody else at this camp or activity and ii) it's hard to figure out how good the camp or activity might be.

That's where BratBliss comes in (by the way it's a play on words to imply converting brats to bliss). Through a really simple interface, you can set your kid's status and view your friend's kid's status as well. So, you can now plan and coordinate your kid's summer activities and camps with your facebook friends.

What about visibility of this information? Well, only your friends can see this. Your friend's friend's cannot see it. How about if you don't want some friends to see this? No problem, you simply put them on a "do not share" list. So you can share this information only with friends you want. No message is sent to the friends that you put on the "do not share" list. 

What do you think? Try it out and send me comments. I'd love to hear if you found the site useful or not.