Looking at the massive amount of users that Facebook has, and considering the general convergence of web services, I would suggest Facebook to go Google on a range of features. By going Google I mean developing a matching office suite that’s integrated in Facebook, and also an email client that’s open to email communication with the outer world. By doing that, Facebook would eliminate 2 more reasons to ever leave Facebook. Keep that development in mind and Facebook might become the next internet…

Step 1 – create a dedicated account for your child
As you don’t want your documentation of your childs utterances to disappear among all your other tweets, you should create a dedicated account for your child where you tweet the words as they come.

Step 2 – get your tools ready
As you probably (hopefully) won’t sit with your laptop every time your child produces a new word, you should sort out your applications. The easiest way is of course to just update by texting in new words – but as Twitter doesn’t allow you to maintain multiple accounts via texting, you should consider using HelloTxt or Ping.fm to have text access to several accounts.  If you want to update via pc, mac or smartphones there’s a plethora of applications and services you can use. Currently my favourites for managing multiple accounts are Seesmic (air application), Twhirl (air application), and Hootsuite (web).

Step 3 – analyze the data
After some time, you can run the tweets via TweetStats and get some nice graphs of how your childs vocabulary expands. …In order to get your expectations right you should be aware that typically developing children has a of vocabulary size for 0 to 67 different words at around twelve month, and 13 to 471 different words at eighteen months (source).

(…no that’s not one of my children’s speech development curves – merely the stats for @pcheick)

Step 4 – hand over account at proper age
… and get credit for being the considerate parent you are. You can also count in the great favour you are doing your child by securing her  digital identity on Twitter from the early start on. This will probably save her from the grief of having to use handles as ‘thereal_[child name]‘ or ‘Melissa2009′.

That’s it I hope to do this with my youngest son – expecting first updates in a years time from now.

Please let me know if you think this concept could be improved or developed in any way.