Get the latest tech news
Beeper was just acquired by Automattic, which has big plans for the future of messaging
Instead of fighting the blue bubbles, now Beeper will try to make them irrelevant.
“Having worked on this for three and a half years,” he says, “and seeing how difficult it is to bring something like this to life, we’ve realized we need to know who our friends are in this game.” Automattic is a powerful, long-time advocate for open software, was an early investor in Beeper, and has a good reputation as a steward of its acquisitions. Mullenweg told me that in October as he was announcing another acquisition: a $50 million purchase of Texts, an all-in-one messaging app that is Beeper’s main and maybe only direct competitor. “Our vision is to leverage these connections that we have to other companies and other networks,” he says, “but over time, migrate people and give them an opportunity to move to an open standard for messaging.” If Automattic and Beeper get this right, the blue bubble fight won’t even matter anymore.
Or read this on The Verge
