Did you hear about the mom who found her baby's photo being used as part of an online adoption scam? What about the mom who declined a playdate invite through a post and wound up having her kids schedule details viewed by "friends of her friends" that after "commenting" totaled more than 3,200 people she had never met? Well, it happened (and the latter example happens thousands of times daily if you can believe it).

Don't blame the messenger, I'm not trying to scare you, but the popular phenomenon of "friend" based internet networks seems to have taken moms from being once protective of their family's privacy to a state of just puting it all out there for anyone to see. And don't get me wrong...Facebook is great for keeping up with friends old and new. Twitter has it's place in getting communication out quickly. But blasting a quick post to hundreds that my kid can't make the playdate because she has ballet and then having comments follow that mention the name of the ballet studio??? Not for me.

This is why, as a mom of four young girls, I worked to help create nesting.com. I'm not suggesting that you say bye-bye to FB or your "tweets" because I know that's a non-starter as much as it is unnecessary. But I will tell you that of the THOUSANDS OF MOMS THAT ARE USING NESTING TO COORDINATE BETWEEN THEIR FAMILIES all of them love the way it keeps thier schedules, their conversations and photos safely shared between one another and only with those that need to be in the loop.

The difference is that communication on nesting originates either through a direct private message to specifically selected friends or within the safety of private groups. The groups are very much in context, which means they exist because the members share a common activity or interest, like a playgroup or a group of classroom or team parents...or one for an extended family, which I use every day to share updates and pics with my family back East. With nesting it is impossible for anyone to post something on your profile page for unintended people to see - and the bulletin board that keeps all of your activity listed and organized for you is ONLY seen by you. You still get all of your activity and info brought to one place (your nesting bulletin board) with links to all the details, but only you can access that list.

Nesting also notifies you by email, which you can easily set-up to either give you information instantly as posts or messages happen, or you can set-it-up to just send you one bulletin at the end of the day that lists all of the things that have happened related to you or your family.

So I hope you'll give a nesting.com group a try. It is now easier than ever to invite others directly to any group you create and the new photo galleries within groups are awesome...(you can click on a past calendar event in any group and your photos will upload directly to that event's album and notify those that participated.)

I would recommend trying:

A GROUP FOR YOUR EXTENDED FAMILY

A GROUP FOR YOUR CLASSROOM

A GROUP FOR YOUR KIDS' SPORTS TEAM

A GROUP YOUR MOM & BABY PLAYGROUP

A GROUP FOR A SCOUT TROOP

A GROUP FOR ANYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF!!