Can a microblogging twist on Gmail raise Google’s profile in social networking? We’ll soon find out. At an event at company headquarters today, Google announced Google Buzz, a new Twitter-style status update system for the email service that will allow users to share their everyday mundanities and inanities and follow those of selected contacts.

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Apple’s recent reiteration of support for AT&T and its decision to debut the iPad on the carrier’s network are fueling speculation that AT&T may hold on to its iPhone exclusive far longer than anyone is expecting. Indeed, in a note to clients today, Barclays Capital analyst Vijay Jayant suggests that the arrangement will last through the summer, perhaps to year’s end.

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Here’s a metric to consider in advance of The Mobile World Congress next week and the likely debut of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 operating system: As widely maligned as it is, Windows Mobile was still running on 18 percent of U.S. smartphones at the end of 2009, according to comScore.

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Apple’s refusal to support Flash on the iPhone, and soon the iPad as well, might not be a death knell for Flash, but it will surely hasten its decline if Adobe isn’t careful.

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The iPad’s lower-than-expected price may go lower still if the device doesn’t perform as well at market as Apple hopes. Recounting his recent meeting with some executives from the company in a research note issued last night, Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope said Apple is quite willing to get even more aggressive with iPad pricing.

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Its merger with Sun Microsystems finally closed, Oracle is moving on to new acquisitions. The first: AmberPoint, a service-oriented-architecture management outfit that the company says fits well with its Fusion Middleware offering.

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Google has built up quite a business scanning the written word for contextual advertising opportunities. Now it hopes to do the same for the spoken word as well. The company is reportedly developing a real-time translation technology for our phones.

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Leo Apotheker has resigned as CEO of SAP AG after the German software company’s supervisory board declined to renew his contract. SAP offered no reason for the departure, insisting it was by “mutual consent,” though this hardly seems the case given the fate of Apotheker’s contract.

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QOTD

“With the iPad pointing to even greater demand for mobile broadband on the horizon, we must ensure that network congestion doesn’t choke off a service that consumers clearly find so appealing, or frustrate mobile broadband’s ability to keep us competitive in the global broadband economy.”

– Phil Bellaria, director of scenario planning for the Federal Communications Commission, and John Leibovitz, deputy chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, wonder about the iPad’s impact on the country’s broadband network.

Torrential rain in the west and blizzard of death in the east can mean only one thing. Using a fat rodent to divine the weather is at at least as accurate as $100 million in geosynchronous weather satellites. So as AllThingsD battens down the hatches on both coasts, Weekend Update is here to be the perfect accompaniment to hot tea and power-outage candles. So charge up the laptop while you can, and read on for a full week’s tech trends straight from our intrepid team.

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Could Apple’s future as a multichannel video distributor lie not with AppleTV but with the iPad? Might the “best of TV” iTunes subscription offering the company has been pitching to TV networks since last November be primarily intended for that device and not the company’s sleeper AppleTV platform?

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Facebook has given itself (wince) another facelift. In celebration of its sixth birthday, the social networking site has redesigned its homepage and navigation with an eye toward increased usability. Among the improvements: A notification icon that has been changed from a signpost to a globe.

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The fourth quarter was a record one for smartphone sales. Research firm IDC reports that the industry shipped 54.5 million of the devices during the period. That’s a 39 percent increase year-over-year and one that benefited most top smartphone peddlers, particularly Apple.

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