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Yammer is opening up its microbogging platform. In "Yammer Community" people may now create a community without the requirement that an email address be associated with a particular domain.

This is a big change for Yammer. Many companies do not have their own domains. Opening up the platform means that the service is open to a much larger audience - and has created a much wider place for itself in the enterprise.

Quick - you have 140 characters to say something witty, include a link and disclose the fact that the company you're tweeting about happened to give you a free sample of the product so you could give it a whirl. What do you do?

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association says you should use #samp, one of three new hashtags it has adopted specifically for this purpose, which tells everyone you received a sample of what you're tweeting about.

Once upon a time, microblogging was all about simplicity. Today, even services like Posterous that started out as very simple and easy-to-use tools have begun to add more and more features. Microblogging, however, can't get much simpler than TXT.io. The service offers nothing more than a simple text interface. No more, no less. You log in with a Google account, type your message and hit "post."

This morning, we got news that Microsoft had unequivocally ripped off design and code from marginally successful microblogging service Plurk.

Now, we're seeing reports - and seeing for ourselves on the Microsoft website - that the knockoff site has been unceremoniously ganked from the tubes. Did a major corporation get caught red-handed stealing intellectual property from a startup? Say it ain't so! More interestingly, is the removal of the site an admission of guilt? And are these side-by-side source code screenshots incriminating or what?

After recent comScore data showed Twitter stats leveling off as WordPress traffic continued to grow, some bloggers framed the results as an either/or proposition; if one platforms wins, the other loses.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has weighed in on the subject, stating that the interaction between microblogging and what he's calling "megablogging" is hardly a zero-sum game. "It's not really a 'versus,' it's an 'and'," he wrote.

In 2003, blogging software powerhouse Six Apart launched TypePad, a Movable Type-based hosted-blog service aimed at less tech-savvy users.

Today, the company has announced TypePad Developer Program, a resource that will give developers access to the TypePad API and back end while running their sites on their own web servers. Six Apart is simultaneously launching TypePad Motion, a microblogging service built from the Pownce code base. Six Apart acquired Pownce from founders Kevin Rose (also founder of Digg), Leah Culver, and Daniel Burka in December 2008.

Posterous co-founder Gary Tan just announced that they've acquired fellow Y-Combinator company Slinkset - a Digg / Reddit-style news site with voting capabilities. Says Tan in his blog post, "Slinkset will remain online, and we'll be working on some crazy awesome stuff to bring the power of Slinkset's technology and community to your Posterous experience."

The Posterous experience has certainly improved since its initial launch in 2008. In the past few months alone, the company has rolled out a variety of new releases including a faster blog importing tool, group blogging and the ability to add comments from Twitter and Facebook accounts.