Beluga gives way to Facebook Messenger

Facebook is ushering out freshly acquired Beluga text messaging service to clear the way for a replacement tailored for the social network.

People will not be able to use Beluga to send messages as of November 11 and the service will shut down completely in mid December, Beluga announced in a blog post on Friday.

The team at Beluga, which Facebook bought in March, built a Messenger application that the social network recently launched worldwide in 22 languages.

The application lets Facebook users exchange group text messages with Apple, Android, or BlackBerry smartphones.

"Now that Facebook Messenger is available everywhere, we've decided to stop offering Beluga as a separate service," said the message from startup founders and former Google employees Ben Davenport, Lucy Zhang and Jonathan Perlow.

"You can keep using Beluga for now, but we'll be phasing it out over the next few weeks," they said.

(c) 2011 AFP