Facebook Acquires Beluga, a Group Messaging Service

Facebook on Tuesday acquired Beluga, a group messaging start-up for mobile phones.

In a letter on Beluga’s Web site, the company’s co-founders said  the acquisition by Facebook would not affect the service and the team of three developers who built Beluga were “excited to continue to build our vision for mobile group messaging as part of the Facebook team.”

The letter also hinted that Facebook had no plans to shut down the service, saying, “Beluga and Facebook are committed to create new and better ways to communicate and share group experiences.”

In the past, Facebook has acquired start-ups to take advantage of a company’s developer talent, rather than the actual product the company has created.

Beluga is one of a series of group chat services that allow people to communicate over SMS. Another company that offers a similar service is GroupMe, which recently raised over $10 million in financing.

The acquisition of Beluga is another in a series of small start-ups Facebook has purchased over the past year to help expand its platform, specifically focusing on mobile services. Other acquisitions include Drop.io, an online storage service, and Hot Potato, which was also a mobile messaging service. Both products have since been shut down, and are being integrated into the Facebook platform.

MG Siegler of the blog Tech Crunch, who first reported news of the acquisition, said one reason Facebook purchased Beluga was to hire the company’s three co-founders, who are all ex-Google employees.

 Source: bits.blogs.nytimes.com. See more...

Facebook tests souped-up privacy policy

Facebook announced this week that it's seeking user comment on a proposed redesign of its privacy policy that's meant to make the policy easier to understand while bringing the world of legalese-smothered documents into the widget-filled realm of the 21st century.

In a post to Facebook's site governance section, the company's privacy team offers a look at its "first attempt" to re-organize, rewrite, and add interactivity to the current policy, which is essentially your standard mass of small black text.

Among other potentially interesting re-imaginings, the proposed redesign features an interactive tool intended to demonstrate how profile data is put to use in serving advertisements (click "Personalized ads" and scroll down to "Try this tool"). The tool puts Facebook members into the shoes of someone creating and targeting an ad. It's not clear if users would deem it an educational aid or a nuisance in practice, but that seems to be part of why the potential redesign is being put to public scrutiny in this way.

The privacy team says the rough redesign is "outside of even our regular process of notice and comment," and it continues:

"Because we're tackling a challenge that matters to so many people--and doing it in a way that is so different from what we've done before--we're giving you a look even earlier in the process. If people like what we have, we'll put it through our regular notice and comment process at a later date."

Facebook's privacy team offers up several illustrations comparing its current, old-school privacy policy with its proposed new approach. This one focuses on interactivity and other such features.

(Credit: Facebook)

The team also makes it clear that the effort is meant to involve the reorganization and presentation of the privacy policy, not any significant changes to its actual content. "We've tried not to change the substance of the policy but, in our effort to simplify, we have added some new things that were elsewhere on the site (like our help center) and have made some other concepts clearer," it says.

Facebook, of course, has been battered by high-profile complaints from privacy advocates, including a U.S. senator or two. Last year, the company, which hosts the private data of many millions of members around the globe, instituted major changes to user privacy controls in response to such concerns.

Still, the company has given some indication that it could continue its "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to privacy-related site changes. It launched a tweak this past January that potentially made users' addresses and phone numbers available to app developers. That change was hastily reconsidered after it touched off yet another kerfuffle about the company's practices.

In its post about the redesign, the privacy team speaks proudly of Facebook's "unconventional, innovative spirit." True, the aforementioned tool for explaining ads could conceivably break new ground in the staid world of "reading the fine print." (Heck, if you're gonna go interactive, why not get Zynga involved--"MarketingVille" anyone?) But the truly visionary move here might just turn out to be the outreach effort itself. Making an extra effort to solicit comment before instituting a privacy-related change? For Facebook, that could be the real innovation.

You can check out the potential redesign, and leave a comment for the Facebook privacy team, here. And, as always, we encourage you to leave a comment for CNET readers and staff below.

Source: news.cnet.com

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