Sick of looking at babies! If that’s you, Unbaby.me can help

Tired of looking at baby pictures on Facebook? Now you can fight back. A new service called Unbaby.me is designed to automatically replace all the baby photos on your Facebook feed with pictures of something more palatable -- like cats, or manatees, or album covers.

Unbaby.me launched Wednesday, and its website has already received 41,000 Facebook likes. That’s a lot of people who were really sick of seeing babies on Facebook.

The photo-replacing plug-in is the brainchild of three New Yorkers -- Yvonne Cheng, Chris Baker and Pete Marquis -- who work together at the advertising agency BBDO. They are, unsurprisingly, in their late 20s and early 30s.

“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 said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

The friends, who all work in interactive advertising, contacted a developer to help them make their joke a reality. Cheng said it took about one month from the initial conversation to the launch of Unbaby.me.

The plug-in can be downloaded from the Chrome Web store. It’s easy to install -- and, if you feel guilty, to uninstall.

Once it is running, it will scan your Facebook feed for key words such as “cute,” “adorable” and “first birthday” -- trigger words that indicate a baby photo may be attached. You can also add your own key words. Then it replaces the offending baby photo with a different photo from an RSS feed of pictures. The current default feed is cat photos.

Pictures of babies that have no captions will not be replaced, though, so if you are looking for a complete baby-photo-eradicating solution, this may not be it.

A quick scan of my own Facebook news feed revealed two baby pictures posted in just the last two hours, both with no text in the subject line at all.

Cheng insists that not wanting to see pictures of babies on Facebook does not correlate to not liking babies at all.

“Personally, I don’t hate babies. I love babies. But I do get tired of looking at babies,” she said. “I think we just addressed the fact that people use social networks for different reasons, and I guess because of the age we are, the majority of people we knew were just using to post pictures of their babies.”

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