30-Oct-2011 19:55

Beluga (FB’s Group Messaging App.) Closing Down

Beluga, the Group Messaging App. that Facebook took over earlier this year in March 2011 is shutting shop.

In a post on Beluga’s blog, the company wrote that, from November 2011 you will no longer be able to send any messages although you will be able to access old messages & stored data until December 15th - after which they will be deleted.

Not really surprising as Facebook launched their own Messenger App. (built by the same people) in late August that included much of the functionality of Beluga.

Beluga was first launched in December 2010 by three ex-Google staff Lucy Zhang, Ben Davenport, and Jon Perlow.

From the Facebook company blog post they write: “We’re excited to announce that we just launched the Facebook Messenger App worldwide in 22 languages!
If you haven’t used it yet, we hope you’ll give Messenger a try — it has all the great features of Beluga, and it’s available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry.”

The blog continued, “…we’d like to thank you all for being such enthusiastic and loyal users. We’ll continue to use your feedback to improve Messenger and make messaging your friends easier, faster and more fun.”