10 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 21.8 ms ] thread
How is this different than Blackberry Messenger?

http://us.blackberry.com/apps-software/blackberrymessenger/

More people use Facebook than Blackberry.
I'd imagine many people would be excited at the prospect of sending free texts to all their Facebook friends.

The main stumbling is how to get free/really cheap data plans to get younger users online on smartphones so they can send the texts via Facebook. I might actually view Facebook as useful if they pulled this off. The downside would be even more worrying implications for privacy - would you trust Facebook with your intimate texts?

It has the ability to work on Android, iOS, WebOS, and any future platform.

Which part of that benefit wasn't obvious to you?

The first website I legitimately want to share with someone else (my roommate was talking about this exact idea the other day, he's not even a techie), and there's no share button to be found (referring to belugapods.com itself, not this article).
Does anyone know anything about the actual product Beluga made? The Slashdot post and CNN article don't contain much information about the actual product, so it's hard to tell, but it sounds like it's either a fancy SMS gateway or a dedicated group messaging system (that doesn't use SMS to deliver messages).
Not so fast.

1) Push notifications are not free if you're on metered data plan.

2) SMS notifications are still the lowest common denominator, unless you know for sure the receiving party has a smartphone.

So Beluga is like Google Voice...only worse