If you are looking for a Mother's Day gift that won't cramp your Second Lifestyle, here's a guide to parlaying your favorite social networks into totally legit Mother's Day gifts that will make mom melt.

Family Reunion

Story Time

Recall the ultimate mother-child bonding experience when you make mom a Shelfari shelf of your favorite childhood bedtime stories.

Add sentimental tags like "the one you read me when I wouldn't stop crying" or "the one we'd recite together word for word." She'll be over the moon quicker than you can say "Goodnight creatures everywhere."

Getting Home in Time for Dinner

You know how moms worry! For Mother's Day, give her peace of mind when you add Whereaboutz, the Facebook app that uses Google maps to display, you guessed it, your whereabouts. 

The best part is the SMS functionality, which allows tech-phobic moms to view your location right from their cell phones as they push their cart in the grocery store. For the Helicopter Mom, there's no better gift than Whereaboutz.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Use geotagging to make a Zoomr map of places where you and your mom have been together. Amp up the sentiment by creating descriptive tags like " 'our' sushi place" and "the ski camp with the dreamy instructor."

Your mom will love this techie travelogue of your special times together.

Bragging Rights

Making mom a Flickr photo album is child's play. Show momma what a mature young adult you are when you hook her up with the handy plugin Slickr.

Slickr uses Flickr pictures as a feed to create family picture screensavers, so she can show off your adorable mugs to her colleagues and houseguests without having to resort to anything so overt as a forward. We can just hear the choruses of "Look what my son made me for Mother's Day" now!

Home Videos

Home movies are the heart of any good Mother's Day gift, so do it in exportable style when you make it on MotionBox. Not only does this site include sophisticated features like the ability to send just a clip or highlight, these elegant movies are also easily exportable to mom's mp3 player or laptop.

Once she's breaking a sweat on the Stairmaster to your four- year-old rendition of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" you'll know you've achieved a place in the Mother's Day Gifts Hall of Fame.

Family Hootenanny

In honor of Mother's Day, hook mom up with a convenient platform for her favorite hobby: planning family get-togethers. Like a less dictatorial Evite, Planypus lets you post potential plans in a more casual, conversational way.

Because the messages can be delivered back and forth by email, SMS, RSS or online homepages and calendaring tools, Planypus works great for both your text-savvy sister, your geek brother, and your mom who won't stop driving you crazy trying to learn how to use her BlueTooth headset.

Misty Watercolored Memories

This next gift idea is the Gen-Y equivalent of the classic handprint-in-the paint Mother's Day card. Like ComicLife and RockYou combined, Bubbleshare lets you give mom a killer slideshow of pictures with bubble captions, holiday themes, audio captions and video captions. So creative and cute!

    We are looking to hire a few great persons to work with us. If you are into Web 2.0, love to create consumer-oriented products and has the skill we are looking for, do contact us. Positions include:

• VP of Engineering
• Sr. Software Engineer
• Chief Marketing Officer

    Check out our career opportunities.

    Quite a few online news sites and blogs have covered the launch and our funding. Check out the coverage:

• GigaOM
  
• TechCrunch
• Seattle Post-Intelligencer
• Seattle Times
• Mashable
• WebWare
• VentureBeat

Sampa Corporation announced today the immediate availability of a breakthrough free service to enable people to share life stories and photos with family and friends by creating a personal private place on the web. For the first time, a non-technical user can easily create a customizable website that combines multimedia blogging, photo albums and specialty features for families and babies such as a family tree or a baby countdown timer - all with the assurance that only family and friends can access it.

"Families have been searching for a simple and safe way to share their kids' daily triumphs without the pitfalls of emailing digital pictures or annoyances of social networking sites," said Paul Gross, CEO of Sampa. "A Sampa site provides a fun, secure and easy way for parents to tell a story with pictures and keep close friends and families members up to date."

Sampa makes it easy to share across generations and geography. "Since we moved to Boston, Sampa has been integral to how we share the latest stories of our kids and our experience here with our relatives and friends back in Portugal," said Sara Martins de Oliveira, a mom and a long-standing Sampa customer. "Every time they receive the Sampa mail regarding a new posting they run to see the latest news. It is amazing how it makes the distance shorter."

Since parents are a primary audience for Sampa, ease of personalization and privacy were key design goals. A Sampa site is created in 5 easy steps.

• Choose a name for your site
• Enter a few details about your baby or family
• Choose a design
• Upload a photo and customize your welcome message
• Easily invite your family and friends

Users will be up and running in 5 minutes or less with their own personal private place on the web to begin sharing stories and photos. The free service is available today at www.sampa.com.

Features and Benefits

Built-in Themes and Applications for a Personalized Website

Sampa features a broad array of themes to suit a wide variety of expression. Or you can upload a picture to create your own theme. Built-in features including a family tree, profiles, and personalized pages give authors a rich set of easy to use solutions for sharing their life events. These features let you create the perfect family or baby website in minutes.

Security Simplified and Engagement Guaranteed

Sampa sites are secure without creating complexity for readers. The site engages friends and family by sending an email whenever a new story or set of photos is uploaded. The email contains a personalized key for each reader to enter the site just by clicking on the link in email, so readers do not need to remember an arcane password or even know the site's web address. And patent pending security prevents the key from working if it is forwarded to someone else.

Integration with Popular Sites and Services

Sampa users can easily integrate content from across the web. Flickr photos and YouTube videos can be seamlessly viewed in a Sampa site so that you can have a single destination for all of your web content.

    Now your visitors can upload pictures directly to your site without any hassle. They can use the website or send an email to the site. And you get to review and approve the pictures before they appear on the site.

    This service is great for family reunions, holiday parties, weddings, baby showers, or any event where multiple people are taking pictures that they want to share with the rest of the group.

    For your visitors to send a picture to the site they have two options:

    Through the website: Any Album on your site has a link just above the picture that reads "Upload pictures to this site".

    Through email: Each site has a secret email address that people can email the pictures to. The email will be like secretcode. upload @mysite. sampasite. com. To find out your secret email address go to your Design Site, click on "Administration Tools" to expand it, click on "Configuration Panel" and click on "Content by Visitors".

    Today we are announcing a new feature on Sampa that allows you to easily select a charity to display a link to it on your site. This will help charities by providing a link directly to their donate page, and also help with their ranking on search engines.

    New users can select a charity during the sign up. If you already have a site or want to change your charity, click on "Administration Tools" on the sidebar, then "Configuration Panel" and select "Charity". You can select from:

• American Cancer Society
• American Red Cross
• Boys & Girls Clubs of America
• Humane Society of the United States
• Hydrocephalus Association
• International AIDS Vaccine Initiative
• Susan G. Komen for the Cure
• UNICEF

    We just hope that other Web 2.0 companies providing website creation, wiki and blog services will match this feature offering it to their customer as well.

    Read the Press Release.

Redmond, WA. (December 12, 2007) – Sampa Corporation, makers of the free website creation service that empowers consumers to build their own personal private networks, has automated the inclusion of charitable links for every site that is created including more than 35,000 websites built with Sampa.  New Sampa customers select a charity to receive “link juice” from their new site during the sign up with the goal of increasing donations to that charity.

“We wanted a way to figure out how to ‘give back’ so we made it as simple as one click to link to a charity,” said Paul Gross, CEO of Sampa Corporation.  “Giving the gift of ‘link juice’ is sharing one of the web’s most valuable assets.  We hope that more companies will join us in this initiative.”

The site that chooses a charity is helping it three ways. The charity receives brand exposure on every page of the website. A link directly to the donation form appears under the charity’s logo, and, more importantly, charities will benefit by ranking higher on search engines because of all the back links that will be generated.

Sampa’s initial list of charities includes the American Cancer Society, American Red Cross, Boys and Girls Clubs of American, Humane Society of the United States, Hydrocephalus Association, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and UNICEF. 

People interested in building their own website can go to www.sampa.com.

    If you think Sampa is likely to succeed, click on the image below and nominate us as the company most likely to succeed.

    We've just got some very positive coverage on TechCrunch.

    They like what we are trying to be. So do we!

    We've added five new template sofr you to choose from. Two of those to celebrate the new season of the year. They are:

• Autumn Lanterns
• Starry Sky
• Roses
• Wedding Rings
• Autumn Halftone

    Over the next few months you should expect dozens of new templates. If there is a specific one (or a style) that you would like, just let us know.

    We are doing some major changes to how users sign up to create a new Sampa site and how users sign in into their Design site.

    If you are having any problem with regards to that please let us know.

    Finally we are providing some help content for Sampa site owners. We just release our new Help system on sampa.com:

sampa.com/help

    We will be integrating it directly into your Sampa site to make it for a quick and easy way to search for assistance.

    We don't have much content yet, but we'll be working on it on the next few weeks and months.

    We've just added the option for you to easily import your online Address Book into your Sampa site and invite your friends and family to see your site.

    Different from a social network, when you invite friends and family, they will not be invited to Sampa, but just to your website and their emails are not shared and all messages they receive are on your behalf.

    We've added support for more than a dozen different email providers, including GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, Windows Live, dot-Mac, AOL, Rediff, Lycos, Mail.com and more.

    You also have the option to import your address book from Outlook, Outlook Express, Entourage, Thunderbird and any other email application that can export into a CSV or Tab-delimited file.

    To invite friends and family:

1. Go to your Design Site;
2. On the third column ('Share') of your Site Overview click on "Invite Friends & Family".
3. Enter your email address and password and click "Import from Email", or select the file (CSV or Tab) to import and click on "Import from File".

    One note about security: Your email address and password are not stored on the website and are just used to get the contact information.

    We found out through some of our Chinese customers that all Sampa sites have been blocked in China. We don't know why and we don't know what to do to be unblocked.

    We'll investigate a possible solution, but it's unlikely that we can do anything unless the Chinese authorities remove us from their block list.

    You've built your Family Tree and send the link to your Family and now you are bombarded with requests from them to add their picture, right? Not anymore.

    We just added the ability for site visitors to upload pictures to the family tree. Once they upload the picture you receive a notification that there are pending suggestions and you can approve or reject them.

    Try it out, it's fun.

    We are very proud to announce the new Sampa.com website that we just released. It looks lighter, cleaner and it has less text and noise to distract you. I hope you like it and let us know what you think:

www.sampa.com

    We are thrilled to announce our new service: Family Tree. Now you can add a family tree to your website.

   See the press release...

Sampa Lets You Create a Family Tree from Your Address Book

New Release Highlights Sampa’s Focus on Family Websites

Redmond, WA. (August 16, 2007) – Sampa Corporation, makers of the free website creation service for consumers to build their own personal private networks, launched an integrated family tree that can be created from an existing address book as part of their flagship free website service.   The release of the family tree is the next major step in Sampa’s strategic direction to provide website solutions for people who want to build personal private networks amongst their family and friends.

“Imagine building four generations of your family tree in three minutes,” said Paul Gross, CEO of Sampa Corporation.  “That is how quickly you can get started building a family tree when you import your address book into your Sampa website.”

The ability for readers to also view the tree as an address book provides a unique twist on the usage of a family tree to keep family members connected.  Your family members can make additions or changes allowing the tree to grow rapidly.  As the site owner, you approve any suggested changes to the family tree. Your family tree will quickly become a repository of both family history and current contact information. 

Sampa’s family tree service is a free extension to Sampa’s existing free website creation service.  People interested in building a free family tree can go to www.sampa.com to create a site with a family tree in minutes.

• If you change your site address, all links on other sites (including search engines) will not work anymore.
  
  
• If your friends and family have bookmarked your site, those bookmarks won't work anymore, so you must tell them about the new address.
  
  
• If you change your domain address, you cannot revert to the old name for 2 hours at least.

1. Sign in to your Design site;
2. Click on "Administration Tools"  and "Configuration Panel"
   
3. Select "Global Site Settings"
4. Change the Site Address and click "Save Configuration"

UPDATE: Upgrade has been completed successfully at 1:30 PDT.

    A few days ago Microsoft announced the Beta 2 version of Windows Live Writer, and we are happy to announce that Sampa is the first blogging platform (outside of Microsoft, of course) to fully support it -- even before it shipped!

    One of the cool features is that you can do a blog entry, like this one, add the pictures and they will automatically be uploaded to your site.

    To get going, you must first download and install the Windows Live Writer from http://writer.live.com/.

    Enabling your blog is easy, just follow these steps:

Step 1) Start Windows Live Writer and select "Another weblog service"

Step 2) Enter your site URL, your email address on the Username field and the password.

NOTE: If you have multiple blogs on your site you can enter the full address of that blog, as in http://mysite.sampasite.com/blog2/ and you can have multiple blogs registered.

Step 3) Just click Yes.

Step 4) Start writing your next blog entry.

Troubleshooting Windows Live Writer:

• If, between steps 2 and 3 you are asked to select which type of blog provider you use, something went wrong. Close Windows Live Writer, make sure that you can access your blog from a browser and try again.
  
• This feature is new on Sampa, and Windows Live Writer has just been released. If you can't make something work, just email us at feedback@sampa.com and let us know.

PS: This blog entry was written offline with Windows Live Writer, of course!

    Sampa now supports MetaWeblog for offline blog post editing, which means that you can now add content to your blog without having to sign in on the Design Site. We already allow you to add content via email and this is another way for you to have more freedom in your publishing.

    There is a list of software that allows you to publish your blog offline, including Ecto, BlogJet, Qumana and Windows Live Writer. Many more tools like that should be available in the near future.

    This is a new feature so it might have some issues. Let's us know if you are having problems.

    A known issue is that you cannot post pictures or other media content at the moment. We plan on adding that functionality soon.

    One of the top requests we get from users is how to add video and audio into their website. We already had YouTube integration, but a lot of people didn't want to add their content to YouTube. Now we have a great solution: Twango.

    Twango is the best all-inclusive media management, sharing and hosting service there is. Not only you can upload your traditional media, like pictures, videos and audio files, but you can also upload more than 100 (!!!) different file formats, from Microsoft Word to PDF to PowerPoint and lots of other cool stuff.

    To integrate Twango with Sampa, follow these steps:

1. Go to www.twango.com and create your account;
2. Go to your Design Site and click on "Add My Twango Media";
3. Give a title for that module, like "My Media".
4. Click on "Configure Twango", enter your Twango Id, and click "Save".

    Now, every time you add content to your Twango account it will appear automatically on your Sampa site.

    There is one more cool thing about the Twango and Sampa integration. When you are editing your a blog entry and you click on Add Image, all your Twango Channels will be listed and you can select the picture directly from the dialog box. No need to copy and paste links anymore.