• MarketWatch launches a fake stock market. Now everyone can play-act as Larry and Sergey — "Oh no! My billions!" [Bambi Francisco]

Starting today, Facebook lets employees from over 1000 companies make corporate profiles (share tagged photos of yourself coked up at the office party!). While this might kill the cool factor for the first 10 Facebooked companies, it means no one in Silicon Valley will be left out in the cold. Anyone with an e-mail addy at Agilent, Amazon, Google, Juniper, Oracle, Sun — even the handful of employees at YouTube get accounts. Yep, everybody's in the Facebook club.

Where did Tom's boys go? A reader at MIT says MySpace is a no-show (despite a Wednesday tip), but Facebook's shopping for CS majors.

Hey, entrepreneurs! In the New Boom, anything but explosive growth is unacceptable. Take a tip from three leading dot-coms and cash in on the Law of Fabricated Returns.

No wonder 19-year-old Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan had to plagiarize her novel — it's because she's sooo hungover:

Apparently there is a new boom (not a bubble! not a bubble!) in the Valley. I WAS NOT PREVIOUSLY AWARE. Fortune hands down its mighty investment wisdom for the Web 2.0 boom:

It's not $2 billion, but it'll do — Greylock Ventures, who just sank $25 million into Facebook, valued the social site at $525 million, according to MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco.

The New York Times (they are so loveable today!) features Orkut, Google's you're-nobody-til-somebody-loves-you social network invaded by Brazilians in 2004. Over 2 of every 3 Orkut users are registered as Brazilians, and if you trust some massaged numbers, nearly every regular Internet user in Brazil has a profile.

Wired News runs a trend story (journalism rule #42: three weak stories make a trend story) on antisocial networking. The tipping point: Full-blown parody site Snubster. It's the Hot New Joke (and by "new" I mean "dated as 'I'm Rick James, bitch'") that's turning into a healthy little community. It's not the first joke-cum-business.

¬ Having blogged that Facebook should take the $750 mil and run, dot-com expert John Battelle backtracks when the Harvard Crimson calls. The key to looking prescient: always have two contradictory opinions to point back to. [Harvard Crimson]
¬ Marissa Mayer gets interviewed — in German (or translated, at least). Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped translates the highlights. Says Google's VP of search: "Nobody ever writes about how we constantly improve our ranking system!" Because it'd be such a riveting story! [Google Blogoscoped]
¬ Kansas City is the new Silicon Valley. [MSNBC]
¬ Wait, Bangalore is the new Silicon Valley. [DNA India]
¬ New York Times Valley correspondent John Markoff (pictured somewhere up there) reads Valleywag. I hope he's commenting as "openwag". [POP! PR Jots]
¬ Things MC Hammer says in his guest post the Google Video Blog: "He [his character in a music video] is willing to do 'all tricks' if she 'speaks it from her lips.' This willingness is possible only if he gets to know her. He seeks commitment, romance and sensitivity." Things Hammer says in the video: "Girl, I need to know your name." Now that is commitment. [Google Video Blog]

We're certainly not paying $2 billion for Facebook. If the price was right I'd be interested in it.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2005, after Facebook was valued at $100 million:

"How geeky are you," asks Newsweek, ruining a perfectly good cover story with an awkward quiz. Bad enough that half of it is desert-island questions; even worse that the "desert-island book" options don't include the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

BusinessWeek writer Steve Rosenbush is the latest sipper of the Facebook Kool-Aid, putting a positive spin on its "sell for $2 billion" plan in his latest article. (Tuesday morning drinking game: take a shot every time he follows a doubt with a "but" — as in, "Facebook doesn't match the scale of MySpace, but...")

Sean Parker's reaction to today's techie-spotting item, Sean Parker pisses off Lindsay Lohan: "The least you can do is use a pic that looks like me." Done. And the Facebook founding president sat down to IM (at my request) about the incident: