Mediaphyter - A Communications Cocktail

Move over 3D ultrasound — MakeMeBabies is here.

Or not.

This blog post is a bit off the cuff for me as I generally try to write about social media trends that impact business or are interesting to enterprise users, but I’ve been giggling over this for two days. On Tuesday, Adam Ostrow at Mashable wrote about MakeMeBabies, a service that allows people to “preview” what their children might look like. They can either upload a picture of their partners or choose from a gallery of celebrities or even grab friends’ pictures from Facebook and MySpace.

The thing is, I can see the use of this service getting way out of hand. Girls who used to sit around and draw hearts and smileys around a guy’s name will now be constantly uploading to and refreshing MakeMeBabies. Terrifying, really. More terrifying is this quote from the MakeMeBabies site that attempts to justify the service:

“Dating services and marriage agencies add value to their services by allowing visitors have extra fun or make a lifetime decision.”

After my eyes reduced from their ultra-widened response to this sentence I started laughing hysterically at the idea of having a guy show up to a blind date with print-outs of what our children might look like (it’s a digitized scene of Kate Hudson’s scary faux character in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days“).

Since Ostrow was bold enough to cyber-procreate with Kate Beckinsale I figured I would do a little experiment of my own. I didn’t want to harm any real, accessible people in my experiment (nor did I want to horrify anyone I know) so I stuck to celebrities.

First up is the spawn of me and the man of my dreams, otherwise known as James Spader. I’ve been in celebrity love with him since I was a pre-teen so why not make a digital baby?

See, by doing this I learned something about James. He snorkels. I don’t — so clearly the kid got it from him.

Next up is a digital diaper wearer created by yours truly and my favorite hockey player (go SHARKS!), Mr. Patrick Marleau.

I’m actually disappointed that little Baby Marleau did not get any of Patrick’s hockey talent. Perhaps he (or she? I can’t tell… such a bad mother I am) will inherit my writing skills instead. Hard to visualize, however.

And finally, just for kicks:

I honestly just wanted to see if Snoop Jenny Jen would come out wearing her father’s low-brimmed hat.

With the experiment complete, I’ve learned that my children will not be cute, will have exceptionally large foreheads, and will all appear to view the world from behind a veil of unabashed cynicism. See, they get that last bit from me. *beams*

All in all, my little experiment with MakeMeBabies was a fun one. But I can’t see anyone seriously using this service (sorry, MakeMeBabies founders). Can you?

Note: My sincere apologies to Mr. Spader, Mr. Marleau and Mr. Dogg.