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The team behind microblogging service Pownce announced on the company blog today that it is joining blog software company SixApart and closing Pownce in two weeks. Pownce left private beta with a big launch just 11 months ago but the service never grew beyond a core group of fans.

The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.

Today, Six Apart is launching three new features for TypePad: enhanced TypePad profiles, a new commenting system, and TypePad Connect, a no-cost combination of services that promises to make participating in and managing communities easier for bloggers on a variety of platforms - not just those offered by Six Apart.

For users familiar with the Six Apart family of products, the profiles will be a welcome step forward from the original TypeKey implementation and the new commenting features offer functionality users have come to expect from commenting systems. But it's TypePad Connect - or more appropriately the vision for what TypePad Connect could be - that makes this announcement interesting.

Update: In the frenzy to cover this breaking story, we had high hopes for a Six Apart announcement that emerged today. After seeing the soon to be relaunched Blogs.com site, our hopes were dashed. See the update to the end of this post for a screenshot and reaction.

Blogs.com sounds like a great URL, right? All these years it's just been used to sell Typepad blogging software, but this weekend SixApart will relaunch the site as a comprehensive directory of blogs around the web, organized by category.

Andy Plesser at Beet.TV got the scoop from video chat platform Seesmic that the company will be powering video comments for Moveable Type and TypePad blogs beginning next month, just like they have for WordPress.com since last month. Founder Loic Le Meur wrote this week that Seesmic will this month become the first Silverlight video service on mobile phones and next month the company will be integrating XMPP real-time messaging into Twhirl, the leading 3rd party Twitter client that they recently acquired.

Is Seesmic blowing up right now, or is it set to eventually implode? Read on and we will consider the issues...

SixApart launched BlogIt by TypePad last night, a Facebook app that lets you post to SixApart blogs and other blogging software like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, to your Facebook Newsfeed and to Twitter all from one place. It's the kind of app that makes Facebook all the closer to being a one stop social media experience.

The service could be more fully developed but it's certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. Here's a few reasons why we believe it's so interesting.