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The big news in today’s business world is Sun’s setting on the proposed IBM deal in favor of taking the Oracle offer instead. Both Oracle and Sun Microsystems announced today that they’ve reached an agreement wherein Oracle will acquire Sun common stock in a $7.4 billion deal. This will move about $5.6 billion of Sun’s net worth into Oracle’s portfolio.

Oracle has high hopes for the deal, expecting to reach $1.5-$2 billion in profit per year for the next two projected years from Sun operations alone (Sun has lost 11% of its revenue year-over-year). This would make Sun into the most profitable acquisition Oracle has made yet.  As Tech Crunch points out, this is a big step towards making Oracle more of a soup-to-nuts provider of enterprise technology.

Sun’s board of directors unanimously agreed to the buyout and the deal is expected to go through this summer. The board had serious reservations about IBM’s offer made last month, it’s reported, which explains why that merger didn’t happen.

Oracle’s largest plans are for Sun’s Java programming language, of course. Oracle themselves have stated that Java is a critical part of their Fusion Middleware offerings and the company plans to push them into as much prominence as their largest business: database systems (Exadata).

It’s not likely that Oracle will promote Sun’s hardware business too heavily, as the company has stated in the past that they “aren’t in the hardware business.” It’s also unlikely that Sun’s server technologies will be dumped altogether, either, being the behemoth in the market that they are.

The choice of buyout isn’t overly surprisingly, at any rate, as the two companies have been close partners for over two decades. Ad to that the fact that Sun’s Solaris OS is the leading platform for Oracle’s database and that their Fusion Middleware line is built on Sun’s Java, and the acquisition gains huge implications. Obviously, Oracle will become even more of a powerhouse thanks to this deal.

This merger is likely the single most important change in the technology world in the past decade and will have far-reaching implications for a very long time. It’s probable that the next two or three years will see huge shakeups in the tech world as companies adjust to this merger and the troubled economic climate we have today.

Ever since I made the switch a year or so ago from a PC to a Mac, I find I have tons of extra time during startup.  I’m spending far less time battling the blue screen from hell, executing system restores and going through a black hole of a boot-up process.  I mean my iMac actually just turns right on, like it is magical or something. So now I find myself with all this extra time during the day since my computer didn’t take the 10 minutes it used to.

In fact, I’m saving so much time with my new Mac that I plan on doing the following with all my newfound spare time:

1) Write hate mail to smug Mac spokesman / “Daily Show” contributor John Hodgman

2) Sew my Conficker virus Halloween costume

3) Finally watch “The Wizard of Oz” cued up in synch with Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”

4) Figure out the difference between a Sunni and Shiite.

5) Find my high school girlfriend on Facebook. Decide not to request her as a friend after remembering her affinity for “Winnie the Pooh” apparel.

6) Upload all my kick-ass “Guitar Hero” video performances to YouTube. Then wait for it to go viral.

7) Tweet that pic of a guy I saw at Applebee’s who looked just like Joss Whedon.

Cancel gym membership.

9) Pen “Howard the Duck” fan fiction.

10) Sell my new paperweight on eBay… a paperweight that looks suspiciously like a PC.

Well, here we are, boys and girls. If you’re a Twitaholic, then you should know by now that your days are numbered. Soon, it will be a cold room in rehab, fingers twitching for any keyboard or keypad, while you recover from your addiction. Why?

Because Twitter is now on Oprah and that means that the social networking phenomenon is about to go Soccer Mom. Yep. Twitter will soon change its name to “Twitamom” or “Tweetalicious” or some other Baskin & Robbins name. Don’t be surprised when the new Onstar has Twitter functionality.

Am I exaggerating? Have I made too much of the Oprah on Twitter phenomenon?

Well, her first message says it all, folks. I’m sure she had multiple writers knocking heads while they came up with this brilliant, sub-140 message: “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21ST CENTURY.” Those are her caps, not mine.

Now take that piece of literary prose and couple it with this other little fact: at the time of this writing, she’s only been tweeting for 3 hours and she’s already got 113,000 followers. Eat that, Ashton Kutcher!

So now that Twitter is dead, CEO Evan Williams has hit rock star status, and the company watches itself balloon out of control…what do we do now? Twitter has no business model, no income stream, and is already busting at the seams.

If you were online Wednesday for the big TEA Party protests—many of which appeared to be taking place on Twitter—you know that the system is at its breaking point. Many Tweet feeds were almost half an hour behind. Others literally stopped working entirely for several minutes.

Well, now you’ve got every jobless soccer mom in America signing up for Twitter too. A lot of them have iPhones as well, so expect them to start sending each other messages that are even more banal than the ones already flooding the Tweet stream.

“Oh, isn’t little Joey so big? You’re a big boy, Joey! YAY!”
“q35oaovohaseyh – that is from my 2 year old, isn’t she smart!”
“i am sendng u ths from my cell. How conexted!”

Somebody please prove to me that all is not lost. I’m about to take a sledgehammer to my notebook!

I don’t know about you, but I read thousands of words a day—most of them online. If current news stories are any indication, most of us today read more news online than we do in newspapers. More than once, I’ve been sent an article to read that I just didn’t have time to right then. At this point, one of three things happens: it gets printed out for later, it gets bookmarked in Delicious for later, or it gets forgotten.

If I printed it, I might read it if it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of stuff crowding my desk. This is a waste of paper and print too, and not exactly tree friendly. If it’s saved in Delicious, it might get noticed again, but it could be days. I tend to use Delicious to mark things I need to read for work or do writeups on later, so I don’t visit it every day.

I Need to Read This is a bookmarking site specifically for stuff you want to remember and want to read, but don’t want to crowd in with other bookmarks. It can be installed as either a full Firefox extension or as a bookmarklet for any Mozilla product or IE. Even on smart phones.

There are obviously many ways this site can be useful, though it’s intended purpose is good enough for me. Setting up an account is easy and installing the extension or bookmarklet takes only seconds. You’ll find that the service is pretty intuitive and you’ll make it a habit before long.

Basically, when you hit a site you don’t have time to read through (a news story, blog, whatever), you can just use I Need to Read This to mark it. This places it on your “to read” list along with a time-date stamp of when it was added, for reference.

At that point, it’s on your “to read” list. Another click on the I Need to Read This button will load up the next “to read” on your list, whenever you’ve got time to read things. Staying on the page a few seconds marks the item as “read.” The next click goes through to the next one, and so forth.

I Need to Read This was started by two developers who had some spare time and a good idea. Jason Grickly and Benjamin Stover got the idea after figuring out that they were forgetting more “readables” than they were reading. So they decided to fix that. Lucky for us, this is what good geeks do.

It won’t take long before you wonder how you ever surfed the Web without this great little tool. Try it out, it’s free!

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just teased everyone from his cellphone using less then 140 words.  He said “Tomorrow just became a very big day” and continued with “Sorry for the teaser – more later.”  What could this mean?  Why is he creating such hype about something?

Maybe the tech world is just getting crazy about something that might have nothing to do with Twitter itself and as Dan Frommer from Silicon Alley Insider states “is Even telling us something about his personal life – perhaps a development in his wife’s pregnancy?”

I think most of us would like to believe previous rumors that Twitter is about to become a part of Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft.  Could Facebook still be interested? Biz Stone, who is Evan Williams co-founder is in Boston this week, which happens to be home to Spark Capital.  Spark Capital invested 15 million during the Series B funding round last year.

Hopefully the fact that Oprah Winfrey is starting to use Twitter tomorrow, isn’t what he teased us about.  That is what Cnet/Webware is saying.

Update:  I hate to get on the rumor wagon, but as I thought about this more, it would make perfect sense for Twitter to announce that they were being acquired by someone like Google tomorrow on the Oprah show.  Talk about reaching critical mass and succeeding in a huge publicity stunt at the same time!  Perhaps Twitter even is hiring Ashton Kutcher as their spokesman?

This site is extremely specific, but it fills a role that is generally lacking, I think. That role is of “universal wish list.” Most people probably have a (highly neglected) Amazon Wish List, maybe you’ve registered for a wedding or baby shower registry somewhere too. Most of the time, our wish lists are spread all over the place and we can’t even say where all of them are, really.

Faavr hopes to fix that by becoming a centralized wish list location for everyone. Simple is almost always awesome, and Faavr is definitely simple to use. The browser button installs on most browser toolbars for easy use. Once you’ve created an account and installed that button, you’re good to go.

Anything, anywhere on the Web can be bookmarked into Faavr as something for your wish list. That item on eBay, those Wicked shoes at Sports Authority, or the coolest gadget on Craigslist. Doesn’t matter, if it’s for sale, it can be Favvr’d.

The wish list part comes in when you visit faavr.com and put in your friend, co-worker, or other associate’s email into the search bar. This automatically brings up their wish list of items. You can link accounts as friends, allowing you to receive alerts when they ad something new to their list, and buy items off the list to give as gifts (or bribes, as the case may be).

I can think of 1,000 things to do with Faavr that would make it totally useful for me, but I’ll just list a couple to get your mind going:

Monetize your blog by adding your wish list
Make that dream list of “if I win the lottery” items
Build a “If I weren’t married, I’d totally own this” list of cool gadgets
Create a list of donation items for your political campaign
Drop a fantasy list of stuff to send for PerezHilton

Of course, you could use it for what it’s meant for: building a wish list of items so that your friends and family aren’t afraid to give you something other than new socks or a gift card to Starbucks for your birthday.

Faavr is free to use and appears to monetize through AdWords and possible affiliate sales of some items linked through the site. Go check it out!