Facebook has killed yet another service, after acquiring it for enhancing the presence of its social networking site. “Save the Whales.” Beluga, the group messaging service acquired by Facebook on March 1, will finally shut down on December 15. The announcement came from the Beluga co-founders, Chief Executive Officer Ben Davenport, President Lucy Zhang, and Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Perlow, who noted that the service would close down on November 11.
This would mean that November 10 would be the last day for an existing user to make use of the service. After the said date, one would only be able to access their old pods and messages, which would be allowed only till December 15. The archives are available for download for those users who want to store their records off their profiles. To download the archives of their pods, here.
When the acquisition took place, a Facebook statement was issued in conjunction with the announcement promised “For now, Beluga will continue to function as it does today. Beluga accounts and data will not be lost.”
An extract of the announcement can be noted as under:
Now that Facebook Messenger is available everywhere, we’ve decided to stop offering Beluga as a separate service. You can keep using Beluga for now, but we’ll be phasing it out over the next few weeks. 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.
Talking about Beluga, it was designed to be a free group messaging service, but post acquisition, it made its way into the social networking giant’s assets, by crawling into the all new Facebook Messenger application. Post acquisition, many had raised a number of questions regarding the future of the group messaging service.
On the other hand, Facebook Messenger has its roots based on the on the same technology as that of Beluga. The social media giant launched its Messenger in mid-August and currently shares its availability in 22 distinct languages, and runs on devices operating on the iOS, Android, and BlackBerry operating systems.
The expected user-friendly service would move on to Facebook Messenger as the messenger has borrowed features so heavily from Beluga.
Facebook might not be trying to improve its position with such developments, but in fact, it seems Facebook is trying to save its established position. its earlier attempts have not been appreciated by a big chunk of Facebook users. The bigger efforts have gone in vain, but these minor improvements have compelled users to make use of the service more frequently.