Facebook, Beluga to work on "new and better ways to communicate”

PanARMENIAN.Net - Social networking website, Facebook has brought the mobile messaging software vendor, Beluga for an undisclosed amount, in a move which could suggest that Facebook is looking for cheaper alternatives to plain text messaging for some of its mobile services.

According to cellular-news, Beluga and Facebook will work together on "new and better ways to communicate and share group experiences," Beluga said in a short notice on its web site. "We're excited to continue to build our vision for mobile group messaging as part of the Facebook team."

Speculation is rife that Facebook will try to use its huge 500 million customer base as a marketing lever to put the Beluga platform into more handsets for messaging services and thus bypass the mobile networks own SMS platforms. Facebook has been on a small spending spree over the past year buying up mobile apps developers and platforms as it sees mobile services as its main driver of growth in developing markets.

However, at the moment, the Beluga software only works on Apple and Android smartphones and it would need to develop a J2ME based platform to be able to reach the mass-market of entry-level handsets.