Saturday, December 25, 2010

Beluga: I May Have Finally Found My Group Messaging White Whale

Group messaging has been something that has been pretty hot for a while now. In fact, it's gotten so hot that products from other hot spaces are starting to pivot towards it ? see: Brightkite. But despite the hotness, I've yet to find one of these apps that really hooks me. But a new entry in the space, Beluga, may just be my elusive white whale. As first covered yesterday by blogger Louis Gray, Beluga is a service with a good pedigree. The three people behind it, Lucy Zhang,�Ben Davenport,�and Jon Perlow,�are all Xooglers (ex-Googlers). What they've built is a simple, elegant, and fast group messaging service. The key may be that it works across several different platforms: iPhone, Android, mobile web, regular web, and text message. But whereas most group messaging apps seem to focus on the lowest common�denominator, SMS, Beluga puts the focus on the native iPhone and Android apps. The rest are simply fallback options. And across all the platforms, they've able to keep the experience consistent.

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