How Beluga Metamorphosed Into Facebook Messenger

Yesterday’s launch of a standalone Facebook messaging app was the culmination of five months of work, which turned a fledgling app from a team of three former Google engineers and turned it into one that could interface with the daily messaging needs of the social network’s 750 million users.

We talked with Lucy Zhang, who co-founded the startup Facebook acquired to build Messenger, about how she took their original app Beluga and turned it into one that could handle messaging volume for a much larger user base.