MySpace's new IM client (now that creepy "friend" you added out of pity gets to TALK to you!) may actually not suck, judging by comments from the top tech bloggers. Jeremy Botter calls it "quite clean and user-friendly." Pete Cashmore says it's "slick, intuitive and well-designed."

• Cingular will go by at&t after the BellSouth merger. Earlier, SBC became at&t — as did AT&T. [GigaOM]

Mediabistro's FishBowlLA has the perfect recap of the last two weeks' dot-com frenzy (Lloyd Braun — pictured because I like picturing him — zigs, Steve Ballmer zags, and still they try to dance):

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.

In what's probably a strategic leak from AOL, an employee reported on Jason Calacanis's Dulles and NYC office hours (held last Friday). Jason Calacanis's plans to revive the bloated corpse that is Netscape.com were passed to Valleywag, in vague and glowing terms. So to offset my constant petty mockery of the Weblogs, Inc. founder and AOL corporate blogger, here are the deets from his meetings in Dulles and New York:

AOL exec Jason Calacanis says:

Blog mogul Jason Calacanis, who just joined AOL last year, is already running the company, judging from his upcoming meeting at the beverage coaster company's HQ. From the ambitious exec's blog:

After he rang up on AIM to brag about his monitors, AOL rising star Jason Calacanis (disclosure: he runs a former Gawker competitor) stuck around to ask for some publicity. So here, everybody pay attention to Jason! (Partial transcript edited to take the boring bits out.)

• Apple buys land for more offices in Cupertino (having outgrown the ones pictured). I really really hope there's a giant cube involved. [Reuters]

AOL's blog network, Weblogs, Inc., jumps into the local-blogging pool with Blogging Ohio. In true Weblogs, Inc. style, the blog sports a massive right column of intra-network links, as well as a mighty footer full of article links. Somewhere between these, the graphic ads, and the text ads, is info you can't find on the two major city-specific networks, Metroblogging and Gothamist.

Okay, it's more that he's honestly asking for it on an open forum, but what's he building in there? (Tip to aspiring writers: use every Tom Waits reference twice.)

If you've had trouble getting your morning Valleywag fix, I'd like to proudly pass the buck to Network Solutions, who suffered an outage.

Sadly, it's real. Google, Flavorpill, AOL, Root.net, The Happy Corp, and MSN will compete in a two-hour dodgeball tourney in New York City this weekend. It will not be pretty (but if anyone sends pictures, I'll put them up).

The BBC is so witty, the writers coordinate gotchas with the photo captioners.

A harsh history of Netscape from a tipster called "The Wall's Ear" particularly trashed Jeremy Liew for "running what was a flagging but sustainable Netscape brand into crap." Liew e-mailed ex-co-workers and colleagues, who rallied for him in the comment threads. They were as fiercely protective of the boy as the The Wall's Ear was condemning.

The tipster who panned Jeremy Liew (saying the AOL exec ruined the already dying Netscape brand) wasn't, of course, being fair. So Jeremy (pictured) took matters into his own hands, e-mailing his former Netscape reports and co-workers asking for positive comments on the post.

Today's guest may be in the know, or they may do a great job of faking it. Your call. Here's the e-mail (edited for typos) from a pseudonymous tipster, "The Wall's Ear":

Sometimes, after Valleywag reports on things, they keep happening. Follow-ups to a few recent stories:

If this were Slashdot, I'd write "from the petty-but-irresistible dept." But among the Jason Calacanis Weblog contributors, I found this:

PaidContent.org has new deets on Jason Calacanis' upcoming takeover of Netscape.com. The Weblogs, Inc. founder plans to turn Netscape into a Digg-like site.