Rumors have been swirling that IBM will be acquiring database security company Guardium after the Israeli financial newspaper, The Market, reported the acquisition yesterday (translated version here). Big Blue is reportedly shelling out $225 million for Israel-based Guardium. This year alone, IBM has acquired six companies, including RedPill Solutions, SPSS, Ounce Labs, Exeros and Outblaze.

A subsidiary of Log-On Software, Guardium provides technologies that ensure security of enterprise databases. The startup protects databases for Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and other companies. The Market reports that Guardium is profitable, with sales in the tens of millions per year.

Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twitter is choking FriendFeed to death.

What’s odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its user’s data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP?

So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data. That, of course, means Facebook has to go along with it. Playing ball with Twitter command and control doesn’t make sense unless Facebook likes the idea of doing the same thing with “their” own stream. Well, maybe so. That leaves two obvious alternatives.

The Gillmor Gang convened Wednesday to ponder the last several weeks of events loosely contained in a discussion of the next generation Web operating system. Three major announcements set the table for this Thanksgiving edition: Google’s ChromeOS, Microsoft’s Silverlight 4, and salesforce’s Chatter collaboration platform. The last might be pigeonholed as enterprise Twitter, but Marc Benioff’s position as a central driver of Web Services since the last collaboration shootout in Y2K suggests there’s more to Chatter than meets the casual social media eye.

This edition sports some familiar longtime Gangsters, including Ziff Davis Enterprise and ITBusinessEdge editor Mike Vizard and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, who promises not to agree to time limits on his next bets. Alert listeners of the old RSS-bound version of The Gang will recall Calacanis bet a sushi dinner that Google would launch its own OS. I pinned him down to one year, and unfortunately the bet was joined 3 or 4 years ago. Even if you accept the idea that ChromeOS is a real OS, then the next bet might be when SIlverlight merges into the new Windows. Robert Scoble says no Silverlight Office for 5 years. I say 2 years tops.

More recent regular Kevin Marks continues to party down on the notion that HTML 5 will hit the mainstream shortly. Kevin sees Microsoft’s announced support for Silverlight video transcoded to Apple streaming format for the iPhone as a validation of HTML5, but there’s no getting around Microsoft’s aggressive use of Silverlight to push the market ahead of HMTL 5′s progress in the video area. Scoble says that’s not SIlverlight on the iPhone, but if you combine the video hack with Miguel De Icaza’s Moonlight recompiling hack to iPhone primitives, it adds up to a porting path for Mac, PC, iPhone, and Android. Sounds like another sushi dinner for me. A feast of possibilities to ponder on a happy Thanksgiving Day.

Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to talk realtime and the cloud with senior Microsoft executives. In this conversation with Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, I tried to delve into what “we inelegantly call Three Screens and A Cloud” from Bach’s vantage point atop Xbox, Zune, Windows Mobile, Media Server, and related hardware. The subtext: Microsoft’s nextgen realtime strategy at the cusp of consumer and enterprise.

ROBBIE BACH: For us, the cloud does a number of things. First of all, it enables us to create community. Right? I mean, the biggest thing — people ask why is Xbox Live successful. Why do we have 20 million members on Xbox Live? And a good percentage of those people who pay us real money for a subscription every year. And some of it is about multi-player gaming, I will grant you. But a significant portion of it is about those people saying, “Hey, this is where I meet my friends. This is where we do things together.”

And if you don’t have a cloud set of services behind that, that gets actually quite hard. How do we do the types of things we’re doing now where you and your friends will be able to watch a movie together and not be in the same room? That requires a set of cloud-based services behind it to enable that to happen in a rich and effective way. And, oh, by the way, talk and see each other at the same time. That’s a pretty interesting experience and a pretty interesting trick. And that all happens through the work that we’re able to do on Xbox Live.

So to me, the biggest thing that the cloud does in the immediate term is it gives us a social environment. It gives us the ability for people to do things together.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration, and he just closed a $9 million series A round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. this follows $1.2 million angel round last spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile Jed Stremel.

Moskovitz, who was Facebook’s first CTO, founded Asana with another former Facebook (and before that, Google) engineer, Justin Rosenstein. Matt Cohler, also a former Facebook executive who is now a partner at Benchmark, will be taking a seat on Asana’s board. And two of its investors, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel, currently sit on Facebook’s board.

As rumors continue to swirl around LinkedIn’s possible IPO, the professional social network is steadily adding useful features that help transcend the platform’s technology into other applications.

LinkedIn recently launched two-way integration with Twitter and also rolled out a plug-in to pull in your LinkedIn contacts within Microsoft Outlook. And today, LinkedIn is opening up its API to start letting developers make applications that tap into LinkedIn’s social network.

For security nuts and enterprise clients, Cisco is launching an iPhone app, called Cisco SIO, to put Cisco Security Intelligence Operations in users’ hands. The app gives giving users real-time access to security information and also lets users create personalized alerts to show security threats that could impact their network.

Powered by the Cisco’s Security IntelliShield Alert Manager Service, the app informs, protects and enables IT staff to respond in real time to alerts and threats to the network. The application will deliver data on early warning intelligence, threat vulnerabilities and sill suggest solutions to any problems that take place. It also provides unique IP and URL address e-mail and Web reputation look-up powered by the Cisco’s IronPort SenderBase Security Network. Via the app, you’ll also be able to access Cisco security news and information from the company’s blog, Twitter feed, podcasts and press releases, which Cisco hopes to use to engage with the greater security technology community.

Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4 in beta at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) today. Some of the new features include more fluid animations, Webcam, microphone and printing support, 200 percent faster start times than Silverlight 3, deep zoom and multi-touch support and more. It now also supports Google Chrome, even though it’s just a rounding error of a browser.

One of the big capabilities of Silverlight 4 is its ability to take rich-media experiences outside the browser in client apps which will compete with Adobe AIR. The non-browser apps fully support HTML, allowing tight integration with content from the Web. It also supports notifications.

We’re here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the keynote and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings yesterday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce’s offerings but is the future of the company’s products. Benioff has even praised Twitter for making the transition between the cloud and real-time web seamless.

Today, Salesforce is making its own venture into the stream with Salesforce Chatter which allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be connected. In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will be able to tap into Chatter.

Thinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, an SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology–offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email.

A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their current provider to a cloud provider without having to deal with the possibility of losing precious information. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied with their cloud provider down the road, they can migrate to another provider seamlessly–while keeping all their emails–due to the capabilities of LiveOffice’s products.

Google Sites, which launched a little under two years ago, have given businesses and consumers a way to quickly build their own websites with no HTML knowledge required, making it relatively easy for anyone without a technical background to build a simple website. Now, Google is making it infinitely easier for anyone to create sleek, attractive websites with new feature Templates.

For those that aren’t familiar with this product, Sites is the reincarnation of Jotspot, which Google acquired back in 2006 (though the two products look totally different). The product is Google’s easy-to-use website and wiki builder that’s widely used by businesses, though there’s a consumer option available.

During IBM’s Q3 earnings call a few weeks ago, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge highlighted business analytics as a sector where Big Blue is investing significant amounts of cash. The company recently acquired data analytics company SPSS for $1.2 billion and business analytics firm RedPill. Tonight, IBM is unveiling a new internal analytics product that the company is touting as the “largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics in the world,” which launches internally with more than a petabyte of information. Along with this internal product, IBM will launch a companion product for clients to build upon this architecture, called IBM Smart Analytics Cloud.

The internal product, dubbed Blue Insight, will provide 200,000 employees in IBM’s sales and development department with the ability to extract data and information to make decisions and gain further insight at the point of sale. Blue Insight will gather information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte (1,000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of data. For example, sales execs may use customizable queries of real time data to understand revenue opportunities and how many sales in their region are closing to help improve prediction. Or a manufacturing process engineer can evaluate real-time data on the plant floor to identify trends and data to improve yield and reduce shipment delivery times.

If you believe the noise emanating from the retweetsphere, this realtime thing is something we don’t need, don’t want, destroys our sense of normalcy, prevents real thought from emerging, is populated by charlatans and idiots with more time than sense on their hands, and besides it causes seizures.

I went to Scoble’s blog on the recommendation of some retweet and found myself watching a realtime updating Twitter list of Tech Smart Guys or something of that nature. Scoble evidently has spent considerable time compiling these lists, running into limits like 500 geniuses on any one list. There are problems with lists, I’ve heard, but none more pronounced than the question of why one would like to produce multiple Twitter home pages to navigate between when the Home page is already useless.

I’ve certainly read numerous explanations of why lists get around the Follow problem by allowing you to create imaginary follow lists (hat tip to the late great FriendFeed’s imaginary friends concept.) Indeed, without Track all Follows are imaginary in that you are stuck waiting around for people to randomly say something interesting on a freakin’ Web page. These are the same Web pages we ran away from when RSS gave us the opportunity to request updates of blog posts when they were published.

But RSS has no social metadata to speak of, and no business model to keep the pipeline flowing. And if RSS detractors are to be believed, the technology never got significant adoption anyway. In fact, RSS scraped the cream of the attentionrati off the top of the Web page model and forced publishers into a race for space in a diminishing window of consumption time. Thus micro-messages were invented as a hybrid of the 10-second spot and texting crowd. Besides, most RSS posts wrapped 1 or 2 seconds of information in a stream of self-promotion — like this one.

The Gillmor Gang debated the virtues and otherwise of the smartphone’s latest pretender to the iPhone crown: Droid. Michael Arrington led the Droid’s faction, with a QVC-like enthusiasm for the power of Any Phone That Runs Google Voice. Of course, he keeps his iPhone and iTouch a handy arm-grab away, but with Droid he may finally have some rationale for excommunicating himself from the Apple bosom.

The New York Times’ Saul Hansell provided context at the telecom level, while ex-monopoly telecom BT’s JP Rangaswami placed his and BT’s bet on the future of open platforms such as Android. JP’s partner in crime at BT and subsidiary Ribbit, Kevin Marks, supported Arrington’s vision of a game-changer in voice, while Robert Scoble was happy to defend the iPhone with faint praise just so he could have something to argue about with Arrington. He also elicits some new CrunchPad details from Mike.

Of course, my perspective is the true correct one, that the iPhone will continue to dominate as Android devices demolish RIM, partner virtually with Windows Mobile over the Silverlight bridge to carve up the volume play, and batter the telecoms into submission so that Apple can ride through the big gaping hole and launch the iBook. A great conversation that will continue.

This morning, Google is making a slight update to Wave to help users unclog their inbox from public waves. Previously, you could see public waves in your inbox, which was fairly annoying. Now for a wave to appear in your inbox, you need to “follow” the wave.

When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. But when you see a public wave that you would like to get updates on and monitor the conversation, you can chose to follow it by hitting the follow button in the wave panel toolbar. You can also archive waves, which will removes waves from your inbox. When there is an update to an archived wave, it will appear in your inbox again. And you can switch between following and unfollowing a wave as much and as often as you like.

Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to meet with a number of Microsoft executives, including Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business. Muglia’s group has grown rapidly to become the critical swing vote in Microsoft’s transition to the cloud, now closing in on almost a third of the giant’s overall revenue. And as Silverlight and realtime become the strategic heart of the integration of cloud and on-premise solutions, what Muglia had to say then will resonate much more clearly when he takes the stage next Tuesday with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to open the PDC in Los Angeles.

STEVE GILLMOR: Will there be a Silverlight Office, something like that?

BOB MUGLIA: What I think you’ll see over time is major parts of Microsoft applications beginning to incorporate Silverlight into their experience. I mean, as — if you look at, for example, the Web companions that Office is doing, they do use Silverlight in a variety of instances. So, we’re seeing that being used there. We’ll begin to see Bing and MSN and our online properties begin to adopt Silverlight inside the set of things that they do. We already see some of that in a limited form in Windows Live.

If you look at my business, which is less consumer-focused, and we focus really on business customers, we are building interfaces that are Web-based interfaces for our business servers, using Silverlight. I mean, it’s become pretty universal that the kind of experience we can provide, in this case, a system administrator, is much, much better, we can write it much faster, by using Silverlight. And as we begin to launch new services — we have a management service we’ll be launching next year that’s System Center Online, that enables people to manage desktops through a cloud-based service — the entire user interface for that, from a management perspective, is all done in Silverlight.

Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company says that Go is experimental, and that it combines the performance and security benefits associated with using a compiled language like C++ with the speed of a dynamic language like Python. Go’s official mascot is Gordon the gopher, seen here.

Here’s how Google describes Go in its blog post:

Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. In our experiments with Go to date, typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go is designed to let you move fast.

We’ve confirmed with Adobe that the company is cutting 9 percent of its workforce, or 680 employees. Adobe filed an 8-K with the SEC today reporting the layoffs. Earlier today we heard multiple reports that layoffs were taking place at Adobe. There are also Tweets about the layoffs on Twitter. Last December, Adobe laid off 600 workers (or 8 percent of its staff) due to the recession.

A spokesperson for Adobe told us in a statement that “Adobe is restructuring its business to align costs with its fiscal 2010 operating plan and budget, the company’s three-year strategic priorities and the realities of the business environment, as well as to ensure its ability to continue investing in long-term growth opportunities.” In addition, after Adobe acquired Omniture, the company reduced Omniture’s workforce by 9 percent. According to today’s filing, the restructuring will cost Adobe between $65 and $71 million.

Sun Microsystems sure had some very nice things to say about the zembly project when it was introduced a couple of years ago:

We like to say that zembly is the development environment for Sun’s bold vision—an application development environment that not only targets the web as its native platform, but uses cutting-edge web innovations such as web services, social networking, and Web 2.0, to change the way applications are built, deployed, scaled, and delivered to where users congregate.

Zembly was an interesting attempt to lower the barrier of entry to writing applications for social platforms such as Facebook, Orkut, Meebo, OpenSocial and the iPhone by sharing services and widgets with the developer community. But apparently, Sun’s bold vision didn’t quite cut it, so it’s cutting zembly loose and shutting the service down at the end of this month.

We recently wrote about data storage and syncing site SugarSync’s move to attract more small businesses, and today, another syncing service, Syncplicity, is following suit. The startup is launching a Syncplicity Business Edition that provides centralized file management, automated backup, synchronization, sharing and collaboration for business users.

Similar to SugarSync, Box.net or Dropbox, Syncplicity is used to store, share, backup and synchronize files from your computer to the cloud. Syncplicity also offers an open platform that integrates well with web applications. The platform enables developers to extend their web applications directly to the desktop, creating seamless interaction between online applications and files stored locally on the desktop. For example, you can associate any text document directly with Google Docs, Scribd and Zoho.