Google has agreed to acquire Upstartle, an early stage startup company that develops a word processor that users access through a web browser.

Upstartle's Writely application is currently in beta and doesn't allow any new user sign-ups. The software lets users share and edit documents through a web browser and provides them with online storage. The software has a look and feel that is similar to text editors such as Microsoft Office or Open Office.

Writely supports most common document standards including documents created in Microsoft Word and the Open Document Framework (ODF) standard that is used in Open Office.

The acquisition will not only speed up development of the application and provide a vast pool of potential users, it should also quench privacy concerns. Some users has raised concerns over entrusting their documents to a startup company. "We're no longer a tiny startup," the company's co-founder Claudia Carpenter noted on the Writely blog.

Financial details of the deal weren't disclosed. The acquisition closed on Monday but wasn't unveiled until Thursday when both Google and Writely announced the agreement on their blogs.

Rumours have married Google to an online productivity suite in the past. When the search engine scheduled a press conference with Sun Microsystems last October, some speculated that the search engine would unveil a hosted version of Open Office.

The two companies instead ended up unveiling a partner agreement that bundles the Google Search bar with downloads of the Java runtime engine.