The first two pictures unbabied via Unbaby.me

If you’re of a certain age, you may be secretly sick of looking at the endless stream of chubby cheeks and little bald heads filling your Facebook newsfeed as old friends become new parents. Well, now you can maintain your friendship and do something about the baby overload.

“Unbaby.me is a Chrome extension that recognizes baby photos on social networking sites like Facebook, and replaces them with photos of cats or dogs or cars or whatever you want. You just add to Chrome, update a few keywords, and tell it what to change the photos to. (The default is cats.)” {TechCrunch}

The extension already has more than 45,000 likes on Facebook, and 1400 tweets to its credit, so there’s obviously a user base.  Still, are baby pictures really that bad?

“Once you’ve seen one baby, you’ve seen them all,” you say, and that’s mostly true. Sure, there are different colored eyes, some with hair, some without, but in general they’re all toothless little people who are, by definition, cute.

Granted there are some unfortunate looking babies out there (author’s note: this refers to no one I know), and some parents who take things too far (your child covered in placenta is not adorable), but in general you get to experience all of the adorable things that go along with babies with none of the spitup, late night crying or poopy diapers.

In seriousness, there are some valid reasons why someone might not want to see baby pictures: a parent who’s recently lost a child might have trouble seeing reminders of their loss, someone struggling to conceive could also be effected negatively. While it’s doubtful that all 45,000 people who liked this extension on Chrome fall into that category, there could be a legitimate use for Unbaby.me beyond catering to grumps.

Spotify has only been available in the US since July, but they aren’t wasting any time going after as many corners of the online music market as they can.

Today at LeWeb, Spotify founder Daniel Ek announced that the company will be launching “Spotify Radio,” with a few features that they are surely hoping will make it a Pandora killer.

Unlike Pandora, Spotify Radio will allow users unlimited skipping of tracks and unlimited stations. Spotify Radio will be available on free accounts, with no paid subscription required.

Building on their recently launched platform, Ek says the Spotify team attributes their success to the fact that “people buy music because they want to take it with them.”

Since announcing a partnership with Facebook at the F8 conference in September, Spotify has added 7 million users. Ek says that 2.5 million Spotify users pay for the service at an average of €10 per month, which would give the music startup revenue of €25 million per month, though there’s no word on how much licensing fees represent, and if there are any differences in radio fees and the licensing fees Spotify currently pays as an on-demand jukebox.

Invitations now optional

If you’ve been wanting to try Google+ (and you’re not a brand or business), good news: Google’s social project is now available without an invitation. there’s a joke about +1s and guest lists somewhere in there, but we’ll let you come up with your own. {Google Blog}

The open registration comes alongside a number of updates including Hangouts (the popular group video chat offering that Facebook has tried to take on via a Skype partnership) on Android 2.3+ phones, and Hangouts broadcasts. Broadcasts will allow group video chats to be publicly viewable, which seems like it could be the beginning of an interesting tie-in with YouTube. That’s just our take, but being able to broadcast video content then record it and save to YouTube seems like a natural next step.

Hangouts APIs were part of today’s announcement as well, so if some enterprising developer is thinking along the same lines and grabs the YouTube API, we may not even have to wait for Google.

Also rolled out today is search for Google+. Honestly, it’s hard to come up with a good reason for why it took the world’s largest search company 3 months to introduce search for the product they’re tying bonuses to, but better late than never.

What still remains up in the air are how brands and businesses who want to hangout and get in on the Google+ action will be handled. Hopefully that’s coming in the next 90-days, but for now everyone else is welcome and it looks like there are a few positives with the current Google+.

Besides being of questionable legality, there are a number of common sense problems here.

For one, while BlackBerry may have been the preferred communication device among protesters, news of and plans for riots largely spread to Twitter and more public channels. Public channels that police could easily monitor to determine where outbreaks of violence might occur next, to better coordinate their efforts. Even on BlackBerry’s network, there’s nothing to suggest that police who may have had BlackBery devices themselves were banned or restricted from accessing more open forum posts, or submitting their own numbers to organizers looking to rally as many people as they could.

The most secure BlackBerry messages – ones with end-to-end encryption are typically not even available to users not on the type of enterprise plan normally used by large companies and government. {Deutsch Welle} So if everyone else is sending messages that can be unencrypted by any other BlackBerry device, would it not make more sense to simply buy the police department a few BlackBerry handsets so that they could monitor chatter on the network?

That’s to say nothing of more open networks like Twitter or Facebook, who are also coming under fire.

So instead of oh, say, putting a few tech savvy officers on the networks to create profiles, and monitor and potentially engage people suspected of plotting criminal activity, you instead shut down their profiles, forcing them to move to secondary accounts which are further under the radar, or onto methods that are more difficult to monitor, like in person conversations.

Then you not only have plots that are more difficult to trace, but less evidence to actually prosecute people with as well.

Brilliant.

Say what you will about their ethics, but maybe we should get News Corp. on this – they seem to be the one London organization who can figure out how to monitor a person and gather information. A group of anonymous UK residents (ex-News of the World?) created Zavilia.com, a site that uses Facebook to get photos of rioters, and has crowd sourced identification of people in the pictures. Once multiple IDs come in on the same person, the name is forwarded to police. Some particularly bold rioters are posting photos of themselves with their loot on social networks, sites where they can sell the merchandise and doing other things online that are easily traceable and identifiable. All this to say that if a random developer with a few spare hours can figure out how to use social media to identify and potentially stop looters, fame seeking criminals with more braggadocio than criminal genius are openly posting photos, surely the entire UK government can figure out how to prevent and prosecute crimes with the help of social media, not in spite of it.

While there is a real need to review the plans for dealing with sudden and unexpected outbursts of criminal activity, Mr. Cameron’s anti-social media strategy is unlikely to have any real effectiveness within it. BBMs don’t cause criminal activity, for all the credit they’ve received, neither Twitter or Facebook caused revolutions. They may facilitate the planning, but for both good and bad, killing a communication method doesn’t kill the spirit behind the messages.

According to a post by Christian Oestlien, whose profile lists him as The Google+ Project Ads Guy (ironic), it never occurred to any of the brilliant minds in the Googleplex that brands, businesses, groups or other organizations that are larger than one person would want to participate.

“There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers…The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. We recommend you find a real person who is willing to represent your organization on Google+ using a real profile as him-or-herself,” says Oestlien.

Really? After the massive success of Facebook pages, it never once occurred to Google that if Google+ was going to offer itself up as an alternative to the dominant social network, a business option might be needed? And the solution is just “find a real person”? We can’t recall a single brand telling users to find them on Facebook and add their marketing manager as a friend.

Not to mention, when Google does open up to the public – which is expected to be much sooner than “a few months,” longterm usage and success will probably hinge on less tech savvy users being able to find and follow their favorite singer, or sports team, or news network, or favorite restaurant or any number of other accounts that really just don’t make sense on a personal profile – no matter how advanced or easy to use filters may be.

Recognizing that, Google reinstated Ford’s account, and made arrangements with Mashable’s Pete Cashmore to have him use the Mashable profile as a personal one. Apparently there’s no love for Big Bird and Elmo, because Sesame Street continues to return a 404. News Stream, a program on CNN International still has a profile, as does the Next Web so we assume they’re two of the arbitrary “tiny handful” of business profiles deemed suitable for testing. Meanwhile, the brands and businesses not deemed important enough to participate – Signature9 included – have been left wondering how something so obvious was overlooked in the first place.

Oh, and it’s pissing off the early adopters who’ve been helping Google+ achieve such rapid growth. Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media offers a summary of why playing favorites after creating a messy game isn’t the best move.

Can we at least convince a graphic design over at Google HQ to slap a beta label on this project?