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Facebook Messenger sinks Beluga, Raffi heads back to the drawing board
Beluga has just confirmed the inevitable -- it's being swallowed by Facebook Messenger. The group messaging app will no longer send texts as of November 11th and will shut down for good on December 15th, just a few months after Zuckerberg & Co acquired it, alongside digital book-maker Push Pop Press. "Now that Facebook Messenger is available everywhere, we've decided to stop offering Beluga as a separate service," the company explained in a blog post last week. If you'd like to grab an archive of your pods before the December 15th shutdown, you can do so at the coverage link below. Otherwise, just head past the break to join us in maritime remembrance.
Facebook burns a little cash, buys group messaging and digital book outfit
Facebook gone and done some serious damage to the company credit card, but thankfully, it's being used for more than replacing chimneys and repairing pool liners. Zuck's prized possession has just snapped up Push Pop Press and Beluga, with the former being best known for creating interactive digital books, most notably gadget junkie Al Gore's "Our Choice" book for iPad. Beluga on the other hand, gained lots of attention for its group messaging app built for iOS and Android. Push Pop Press co-founders (and former Apple engineers) Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris were quick to say that Facebook has no plans to publish digital books; they did confirm, however, that "the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories." Mysterious. Could the Push Press Pop acquisition be the key to the fantasmical iPad app we've yearned for since the dawn of the new millennium? Beluga confirmed the future of Facebook mobile messaging when it said, "we're excited to build our vision for mobile group messaging as part of the Facebook team." Equally mysterious. Unfortunately, no concrete details are being made available, with each site's homepage simply confirming that It's Complicated.
A primer on group messaging apps
If you follow our tech startup sister site TechCrunch, or if you've read any of the reports from the South by SouthWest (SXSW) conference this year, you've probably seen a lot of column inches given to current-media-darling "group messaging" apps. SXSW has a reasonable track record of predicting the Next Big Thing. It was where Twitter first came to many people's attention in 2007, for example, and it was an early success story for Foursquare in 2009, too. My usual reaction to hype like this is to roll my eyes and avoid the apps in question altogether, although that might just be because I've never blagged tickets to SXSW. Eventually, though, TechCrunch's relentless enthusiasm wore me down, and I took a look at one of the commonly mentioned apps, Beluga. To my surprise, what I found was a slick, well-designed app that solved a communication problem I didn't know I had. That'll teach me to be cynical! Before I explain what I liked about Beluga, an aside: there are a number of other significant group messaging apps, including GroupMe, Fast Society, Yobongo, the soon-to-relaunch Betwext Talk and the brand new, bought-by-Google Disco. However, international availability of these apps is spotty. For example, at the time of writing, only Beluga and Yobongo were in the UK App Store -- this is probably because these apps incorporate free-to-the-user SMS features that are tricky to make work cheaply internationally. As I'm in the UK, this means I can't do a detailed review roundup of all the apps. Look for this in a future TUAW post by one of our American bloggers. I'll use Beluga as an example to demonstrate concepts that are common to all the group messaging apps.
Kite-assisted ship to set sail in January
If you thought a solar-powered ferry was far out, get a load of this. Reportedly, a 132-meter long vessel will be making its maiden voyage next month, but rather than chugging copious quantities of diesel while traversing the Atlantic, it'll be sipping down fuel and receiving a good bit of help from the computer guided kite attached to its bow. The $725,000 device will be tethered to a 15-meter high mast and will fly some 300 meters above the ship in order to catch enough wind to actually aid in its movement. It's suggested that the SkySails kite propulsion system will slash fuel consumption by "up to 20-percent," saving the operator some $1,600 per day and reducing carbon emissions all the while. 'Course, all the company has to do now is make sure the January trip is a success and it'll have a list of to-be owners a mile long.[Via Slashdot]
