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Yammer surged in popularity last year. According to former Yammer Vice President of Marketing Steve Apfelberg, the company experienced triple-digit growth. It also expanded its features beyond just microblogging by adding features such as document editing, idea management and its own app store-like collection of third-party applications.

But integration in "real" enterprise software has always been missing. You can embed Yammer in Microsoft SharePoint, but not much more. That's starting to change: Yammer and ERP software-as-a-service company NetSuite announced today that the two companies are teaming up to enable Yammer users to follow invoices, shipped orders, CRM contacts and other updates from Netsuite.

Enterprise social networking service Yammer today released a new version of its iOS app. The new version adds threaded discussions, private messaging and full Retina Display support. Also, users will now be able to view documents from within the app.

Like any other social network, the value of an enterprise social network is tied to the number of active users. In general, the more users the more value - more knowledge shared, more questions answered and more connections made. In this case, does the per-user pricing model of many enterprise social software tools make sense? Enterprise microblogging provider Socialcast doesn't think so, and today the company announced a new pricing plan to deal with that fact.

"Our most successful deployments are those that are enterprise-wide and boasting the largest, most comprehensive internal networks," Socialcast CEO Tim Young writes. "As more people join the network, greater value is created - with every new member that joins comes another potential answer, knowledge source, and idea."

Seesmic and Yammer announced today a plugin that brings Yammer's enterprise microblogging and social networking tool to Seesmic's desktop social media application. In addition to making Yammer more appealing to companies that also use external social media, the integration helps Seesmic differentiate itself from other social media dashboards by offering more internal collaboration options.

Seesmic users can download the plugin from the marketplace section of the Seesmic Desktop app. The Seesmic Web client and various mobile clients do not yet have Yammer support.

Salesforce.com announced today that the free Chatter.com software-as-a-service will be generally available January 31. Chatter.com makes the core features of Salesforce.com's enterprise social software offering Chatter available for free. Chatter.com users will have nearly all the features that paid Salesforce.com users have, with the exception of reporting dashboards and access to the AppExchange marketplace. A few new features are being rolled out to all Chatter users as well.

Twitter-style @replies and trending topics and Facebook-style "likes" are all being added to both Chatter.com and regular Chatter users.

Last week we asked whether we needed a Yelp for the enterprise. Ed Borasky suggested that Quora could fill the role of providing crowdsourced reviews of enterprise software vendors. Focus.com, a more business-centric questions and answer site, could possibly do this as well.

But what about Quora for the enterprise? As in, an internal questions and answers for work related questions? Quora hasn't ruled-out doing this itself, but founder Adam D'Angelo says that it would be too much of a distraction for the company to do so anytime soon. In the meantime, two companies offering a Q&A solution for enterprises: MindQuilt and Opzi.

Yammer announced today that its social enterprise products are now available in Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. The company plans to add support for a new language each week via its Translations application, which lets users participate in the translation process. There are currently 94 languages available for translation via the Translations application. According to the company's announcement, 55% of Yammer's traffic comes from outside of North America.

One of the big themes of 2010 has been the increased simplicity of posting content to the Web. Whether it's Facebooking with your family, tweeting with your online buddies, or sharing a favorite video, photo or quote on Tumblr. All of these activities have given millions of people an opportunity to add their voice to the Web.

Tumblr and similar services are sometimes termed light blogging, as they enable people to publish 'found' things very quickly and at the click of a button. Tumblr is the market leader amongst such tools, followed by Posterous, Soup.io, Noovo and others. Tumblr has grown the most in recent times, but Posterous has fought hard. Let's review the fast-moving and often entertaining moves in this market over 2010.

Socialtext will announce the new version of its enterprise social media suite, Socialtext 4.5, today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara. The new release includes a connector for Salesforce.com, which will pipe activity streams from Salesforce.com into Socialtext. While Salesforce.com has been working to give Chatter users the ability to follow lots of information streams within the Salesforce.com/Force.com ecosystem, not all organizations are going to want to use Chatter their primary social platform. Also new in this release is Socialtext Explore, a new way for users to browse status updates by metadeta. For example, users could search and filter streams based on date, tag, content source (Salesforce.com, SharePoint, etc.), whether it contains a link, etc.

A lot has changed for Rypple, a startup focused on helping employees get feedback, since we first covered it in June of last year. The service has rolled out several new features and closed another round of funding. We caught up with Rypple to find out what's changed, and talked with Rypple customer Rackspace to find out how service works in practice.