Facebook Acquires Beluga

by hornokplease • 15 years ago

51 24 15 years ago

graceyang• 15 years ago

Congrats to the main team. I started using beluga this weekend for a ski trip and was impressed with it's speed and ease of use!

tuhin• 15 years ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but while the talent acquisition makes sense because the execution from the Beluga team has been brilliant, but why the technology? I mean are not they using Twilio's API for the most part of the service?

ryanwaggoner• 15 years ago

Zuck has stated several times that Facebook only acquires for talent. So if you love your product, don't sell it to Facebook :)

finiteloop2• 15 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2277570

geoffc2• 15 years ago

Beluga doesn't use SMS for the transport layer they use TCP. Groupflier (me) and Groupme use SMS and Twilio. Congrat's to the Beluga team!

cmdrkeene• 15 years ago

GroupMe 2.0 (released today) uses either SMS or Push/TCP in the iPhone and Android apps.

justin• 15 years ago

Beluga is an amazing app. I hope it's functionality gets left intact or someone clones it immediately :)

iloveyouocean• 15 years ago

Huddl.me seems to be very close to a clone.

frofro• 15 years ago

I use Beluga all the time. However, I have a feeling it'll be killed off soon.

finiteloop2• 15 years ago

We bought Beluga because we love it, too. We bought it because we love the functionality and the team.

So I wouldn't stress too much :)

zmitri• 15 years ago

Reminds me of http://frid.ge/ which is also a nice, simple, and good looking product.

JakeSc• 15 years ago

Congratulations, Beluga team! Please keep us posted on how things go with Facebook.

oldstrangers• 15 years ago

Both Google and Facebook are on the hunt it seems. Google just buys Zynamics, Facebook buys Beluga.

gaborcselle• 15 years ago

Congrats Lucy, Ben, and Jon!

eob• 15 years ago

I know many reports claim that many iPhone apps "steal" your private information. Beluga is the first iPhone app I've ever used where I've actually seen it happen before my eyes.

I signed up for Beluga while on a ski trip with a bunch of friends. I used it for the weekend -- it worked pretty well -- and then forgot about it.

A few weeks later, I started getting notifications on my phone: "Firstname Lastname is now on Beluga". The only problem? I had no idea who Firstname Lastname was. But I had a suspicion. See, I had synced my iPhone contact list with my Google Account, so unfortunately my iPhone has just about anyone who has ever emailed me inside it's address book.

I checked the address book and, sure enough, the person Beluga was notifying me about was in there.

So here's the thing: iPhone notifications are push, not pull. Which means a Beluga server pushed this notification to me. Which means the Beluga server knew this person was in my address book. Which means the Beluga app uploaded my address book to their servers.

I know that in this day and age, practices like this are becoming commonplace, but I think downloading someone's address book without asking permission is wrong, even if it is contractually allowed by Apple's TOS and the API.

ashishg• 15 years ago

However, they're not doing anything harmful with your information, and they're just addressing that information to you.

Many iPhone apps do this with your address phone book as well - such as Viber.

I'm not too sure what's going on in the backend system, but I doubt they're able to look through your whole contact list. In any case, turn off the Push notifications if you don't enjoy them.

Where it gets harmful is when they use your information for something else - then I agree with you. If the information is meant to serve your needs, it should be fine.

BarkMore• 15 years ago

Beluga uploads a SHA-1 hash of the email addresses. http://community.belugapods.com/beluga/topics/privacy_concer...

saurik• 15 years ago

That is only at all comforting if they first salt the data so it would not be comparable to information gathered by other services.

Facebook Acquires Beluga

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