According to an official statement on Friday, Facebook is shutting down Beluga social text messaging service (aka BelugaPods) which the company acquired back in March 2011. As reported by GigaOM, this move is not unexpected since Facebook now has its own dedicated Messenger app for iOS. Facebook Messenger was developed by the founders of Beluga who worked for nearly six months on the project.

Here is the official statement by Beluga on its website:

Now that Facebook Messenger is available everywhere, we’ve decided to stop offering Beluga as a separate service. You can keep using Beluga for now, but we’ll be phasing it out over the next few weeks:

Starting November 11, you’ll no longer be able to use Beluga to send messages, but you can still get to your old messages on the Beluga app and website. If you want, you can also download an archive of your pods.

On December 15, the Beluga service will shut down completely, and you’ll no longer be able to access your old pods or messages.”

Facebook Messenger is now available worldwide in 22 languages on iOS, Android and BlackBerry platforms.