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Oracle of Facebook

= After One Tweet, Larry Ellison Takes a Break = When Oracle CEO Larry Ellison started using Facebook a few years ago, he couldn’t stop using the social network. Not so with Twitter, apparently.



WHEN ORACLE CEO Larry Ellison started using Facebook a few years ago, he couldn't stop using the social network. Not so with Twitter, apparently.

Ellison started using Twitter yesterday. So far, he's racked up more than 23,000 followers, but he doesn't follow anybody, and he's launched a grand total of one tweet: a promotion of a product announcement Oracle hosted at its Redwood Shores headquarters yesterday.

It's a bit of a letdown for those who were hoping for a few zingers from Ellison, a man who's produced an entertaining quote or two in his time.

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He may be below-average in the tweet department, but things were different when he started with Facebook, according to Ellison. "For about three months I was kind of obsessed with Facebook," he said at the D: All things Digital conference last week. "I was on there all the time ... making friends, you know, meeting people I otherwise would never meet. Telling them what I had for breakfast, which is extremely interesting. I would find out what they had for breakfast which is not as interesting."

Although his company is best known for databases, Oracle also sells software to marketing and HR departments, who increasingly care about what's happening in social networks. Oracle recently bought two companies that help corporations analyze and manage social media: Collective Intellect and Virtue. At yesterday's event, he demonstrated how Oracle's software could integrate with marketing campaigns on social media websites.

"I try to use these social networks and I try to use all of these social technologies just so I'm aware of what's going on and what's being done with our technology," Ellison said last week. "And when you use these things you get a certain degree of insight of what is possible today."

He hasn't approved a Wired Facebook friend request yet, so we can't report what Mr. Ellison had for breakfast today. To tell the truth, it's not really clear which of the several Larry Ellison accounts on Facebook are actually his. Oracle wouldn't say, and a company spokeswoman declined to comment for this story.

Via Ellison's single Tweet, however, we're told: "Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020."