Boom, Google buys chat king Meebo

Whoa, Google is buying popular instant messaging startup Meebo for an undisclosed sum.

Meebo, which has an iPhone app, provides a cloud-centric solution that brings disparate instant messaging services under one fold.

Nowadays, Meebo is billed as a social platform for connecting users. They command an army of 190 million unique users globally and its service is used to send over 90 million messages daily…

The Meebo team just broke the news on their blog.

We are happy to announce that Meebo has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google!

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. 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.

We’ve had a blast building Meebo so far and we’re really excited to start the next leg of our journey.

Thank you all for coming along for the ride!

A source told Liz Gannes over at the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD blog a few weeks ago that Google would agre to pay a hundred million dollars for the startup.

Meebo supports dozens of instant messaging services, including the more popular ones such as Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, CafeMom and more.

It’s unknown if Google has any plans to improve its own Gtalk service through Meebo’s technology that connects incompatible chat networks.

For all we know, the search Goliath could be content with integrating Meebo’s social bar into the Google+ thing.

The instant messaging space has been largely unchanged for years, with little innovation and lots of fragmentation.

This acquisition will certainly change the pace of the game, if not alter the landscape.

What do you guys think?