Google Buys Meebo, Quickoffice In 24 Hours: Deals Boost Google Plus, Productivity Apps

In the past 24 hours, Google has acquired two companies to substantially improve its online services. On Monday, Google bought social start-up Meebo to enhance social services like Google Chat and its social network Google+; on Tuesday, Google bought Quickoffice to boost the functionality and compatibility of Google Apps like Docs, Gmail, Calendar, Google Drive and more.

The terms of both deals were not disclosed, but AllThingsD believes Google was considering spending $100 million on Meebo.

Meebo was an early pioneer of instant messaging, and has been one of the few companies to successfully monetize various forms of Internet chat. Google will likely take over Meebo's methods and technologies to create a better chat platform, as well as more ways to advertise through chat services and its Google+ social network.

For more than seven years we've been helping publishers find deeper relationships with their users and to make their sites more social and engaging, Meebo's company blog states. Together with Google, we're super jazzed to roll up our sleeves and get cracking on even bigger and better ways to help users and website owners alike.

Even though Meebo started out as just a simple IM client, its flagship product was called the Meebo Bar, which framed webpages with options for sharing content to social sites like Facebook and Stumbleupon; Google will likely transform this into a Google Bar for sharing content to Google+. Google will also likely take Meebo's technology for getting recommendations for similarly liked sites, and the ability to save favored content. Meebo's website explains that the service is all about creating an interest profile to get new and timely information about the things that matter to you.

Google will likely take key bits of Meebo's technology and implement them throughout Google's services, as the company now shifts towards the social realm.

The second key acquisition in the last 24 hours was Quickoffice, which is a maker of mobile productivity software. Alan Warren, Google's engineering director, explains the decision:

Today, consumers, businesses and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyone and on any device, Allen said. Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we'll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite. Quickoffice has a strong base of users, and we look forward to supporting them while we work on an even more seamless, intuitive and integrated experience.

One of the best features of Quickoffice, which is installed on more than 300 million devices in more than 180 countries, is its ability to open and create documents in almost any kind of format, making them accessible for any kind of device or computer via the cloud (Google Drive). This technology could be extremely useful for Google's applications like Google Docs, so users can create documents in any format, on a Mac or a PC, that can be opened on mobile and desktop computers of any kind.

Alan Masarek, CEO and co-founder of Quickoffice, thanked his users and supporters on the Quickoffice blog while airing his enthusiasm about the acquisition.

When we embarked on our mission to become the world leader in office productivity, we knew we were taking on a huge challenge, Masarek said. We worked very hard to build Quickoffice as a user-friendly, seamless and yet powerful way to view, edit, sync and share documents anywhere, anytime. It's been a very humbling experience to see this vision embraced by our users. Now, we are ushering in a new chapter with Google. By combining the magic of Google's intuitive solutions with Quickoffice's powerful products, our shared vision for anytime, anywhere productivity can only grow.

The acquisition of Quickoffice puts Google in a prime position to create better mobile software, particularly for enterprise users that need professional features like encryption and editing. Making Google not only open, but compatible with almost any device, will be the key to making Google a more business-friendly company.

So there you have it. One deal to make Google more social, and another to make Google more businesslike. Not bad for 24 hours.