Most people find babies adorable, but in many cases new parents are so obsessed with their offspring that it's all they think about, talk about, and post about. And while you may find babies cute, you may also grow tired of seeing your Facebook news feed dominated by pictures of babies. Luckily, now there is a solution to this baby-mania: a new service called Unbaby.me.
The service is designed to automatically replace the baby photos on your news feed with pictures of cats, dogs, cars, bacon, or whatever you prefer. Unbaby.me launched Wednesday, Aug. 1, and the service's Web site has already received 46,000 Facebook likes. That's quite a high number of people sick of seeing their Facebook feed hijacked by baby photos, and the number of fans for this app is growing as we speak.
Unbaby.me comes as a Chrome plug-in and is the brainchild of three New Yorkers: Yvonne Cheng, Chris Baker, and Pete Marquis, who work together at advertising agency BBDO. "We were having drinks one night after work and were joking around about how Facebook is just lousy with babies, and wouldn't it be funny if you could replace all those photos with cats," Cheng told the Los Angeles Times.
Following that discussion, the trio contacted a developer to help them turn their joke into reality. According to Cheng, it took roughly one month from the initial talks to the actuall launch of the service. The Unbaby.me plug-in is available for download from the Chrome Web Store. It's very easy to install, as well as uninstall, if you just want to try it out for fun.
Once you install the plug-in, it will scan your Facebook feed for keywords such as "first birthday," "baby shower," "first steps," or other such trigger words that indicate a baby photo may be attached. You can add your own keywords to make it more effective, for instance add the names of the babies frequently popping up on your news feed. Based on those keywords, the plug-in replaces baby photos with different images from an RSS feed of pictures. Currently the default feed is cat photos, but you can set it to display whatever images you want.
On the downside, pictures with no captions will not be replaced, meaning that if a baby photo is not accompanied by one of the set keywords, you're still stuck on Babybook instead of Facebook.
While many feel offended and find it incredibly rude for someone to be bothered by their baby pictures, Chang insists that not wanting your Facebook news feed dominated by babies does not mean not liking babies at all.
"Personally, I don't hate babies. I love babies. But I do get tired of looking at babies," said Chang. "I think we just addressed the fact that people use social networks for different reasons, and I guess because of the age we are [late 20s - early 30s], the majority of people we knew were just using to post pictures of their babies."
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