Meowbify splashes (more) cats across the internet

B.C. technology startup Mobify is getting international attention with a service that turns all of a website's images into cat photos. (Tumblr / Meowbify.com)Are you bothered by the lack of cute cat photos on your favourite news website?

One Vancouver-based tech company is taking steps to ease your pain with a new, tongue-in-cheek web experiment they call "Meowbify".

Created by a small team of mobile developers at Mobify, Meowbify improves the cat to no-cat ratio of any website exponentially, with little more than a click.

Users can plunk the URL of their favourite websites into a generator at meowbify.com or simply type "cat." before the link and ".meowbify.com" after it.



Every image on the chosen page is immediately replaced by gifs (short animated pictures) of cats pouncing, playing, and flying through space - as cats are wont to do online.

"Meowbify uses the Mobify Platform and moxie to solve the not-enough-cats-on-your-favorite-website problem," writes James Sherrett on the company's blog. He lists BBC.com and Harvard.edu as examples of fun websites to "catify."

While the company maintains that their goal is to show how the platform can give developers full control over web pages, many are cracking jokes about other potential reasons for the service online.

"Meowbify: Making the worst parts of the internet safe for cat-lovers," writes boringlove on Reddit.

"Eurozone crisis getting you down? Check out the meowbified Financial Times website," writes Super Cute Kitten on Facebook. "This is purrfect."

We took the liberty of running Meowbify on cbcnews.ca and the results were adorable.



Have you found a particularly fun website to fill with cats? Take a screenshot and upload it to the CBC Your News community so that we can compile a gallery of our favourites to share.