The house news came as an afterthought in a first-person New York Times profile of how Williams came to run the fast-growing Internet message-broadcasting service, which some 6 million people use to blurt out 140-character updates to anonymous strangers online.

Also shortchanged in the profile: His spouse, who has gone by the unduly drab name of Sara Williams since they wed in 2007. The two met at Google, and one could argue that she's been far more important to his subsequent success than the Google shares he got. All that we're told about her:

My wife, Sara, a designer, keeps me balanced. We're building a modern house that we hope will be done by 2010. The design is a challenge - that's why she's in charge.

The cliché is that opposites attract, and the Williamses certainly fit the part: Awkward Midwestern farm boy meets chic Mexican-Japanese-Chinese designer; scatterbrained nerd meets detail-oriented perfectionist.

Read how Williams describes his first company:

We figured out how to create Web sites, but I didn't want to work on other people's projects. I had no business running a company at that time because I hadn't worked at a real company. I didn't know how to deal with people, I lacked focus, and I had no discipline. I'd start new projects without finishing old ones, and I didn't keep track of money. I lost a lot of it, including what my father had invested, and I ended up owing the I.R.S. because I hadn't paid payroll taxes. I made a lot of employees mad.

His second company, Pyra Labs, which gave birth to Blogger, was no better. In the wake of the dotcom bust, Williams ended up running Blogger by himself, with a trail of exasperated employees left behind him. That he managed to rebuild it, hire more people, and sell the mess to Google was a miracle.

Twitter, too, suffered because of a bad management decision Williams made: Appointing bike-messenger fanboy Jack Dorsey as the service's CEO.

Not that we're convinced Williams, who fired Dorsey and took his post last year, is a better choice. The company still has no source of revenues. Investors wink and tell the business press that they know exactly how Twitter will make money. (What they really mean, but will never say: By selling itself to Facebook, Google, or some other sucker.)

We have a better idea for who should run Twitter, if it has any hopes of being a serious business: Sara Morishige Williams. Her sole public involvement with the company was an eight-month stint designing Twitter's new office. But her professional background is in human resources, an area where Twitter could obviously use help. (Remember the incident where a clueless Twitter employee broadcasted the names of 186 rejected job applicants?) As Williams himself admits, he can barely cope with email. Sara's LinkedIn profile details how she scheduled 45 interviews a week, and a former coworker gushes:

She is dedicated, commited, detail-oriented, pro-active and fun to work with. She easily commands the respect of peers and is able to communicate effectively senior management.

If not CEO, why not make her chief operating officer at least? Let her mind the details Williams is so obviously loathe to handle while he hobnobs with Ivanka Trump at the White House. In perfect seriousness, it makes no sense to have her spending time designing the couple's house when Williams's business so obviously — no, desperately — requires a ground-up rebuild.

(Photo by evhead)

The tip came from a Jason Felts at Edge Productions. Edge is the PR firm of Jonathan Jaxson, the wacky publicist whose stunt with leaked nudie pics got a client, Disney star Adrienne Bailon, booted from Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. In a now-deleted post archived on The Insider, Jaxson crowed about signing Zolciak as a client.

It figures that anyone stupid enough to hire Jaxson as a flack would also be too stupid to operate her own blog. Kim Zolciak Online is hosted on Blogger, Google's free, Web-based blogging service. Either that, or she just really doesn't like blogs — even her own. From an interview with Paper last fall:

How are the blogs treating you these days?
I try to stay away from them. Initially they were great, and they just got worse and worse. I don't think people can see who you are from seven episodes that are one hour each.

how often Mayer, Buyukokkten, and their respective boyfriends turn up at social events together.

Whatever the motivation for it, Mayer's decision to favor her friend's site turned out poorly. She's still talking about how Orkut is inexplicably big in Brazil and India — and nowhere else. Blogger development, meanwhile, remained stalled for years, wasting the site's early lead in blogging. Yes, Google's late to the social-networking game — and it's Google's own fault.

(Photo of Mayer and Buyukkokten by Damion Matthews)

That's an understatement. The Russian Business Network is infamous for operating botnets, distributing malware, and stealing private information. But its usual targets are businesses, not nation-states. A year ago, Brian Krebs wrote in the Washington Post about RBN's exploits, which included an attack on the Bank of India. The Estonian government blamed the RBN for three days of attacks on its Web sites in April.

Armin, the security researcher says Georgia's hacked sites are now routed them through servers in Russia and Turkey that are "well known to be under the control of Russian Business Network and influenced by the Russian Government." The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia has moved its website to Google's Blogger — itself a notorious hotbed of spam, but at least one that's hosted on a theoretically more secure network.

Likely because of the rumored privilege afforded to it by Google's search algorithm. Blogger blogs appear on the blogspot.com domain, which has high rank in search results, and Google makes it easy to run profitable AdSense text links on the site. That adds up to easy money.Researchers aren't clear if spammers have managed to compromise captchas through automation or simply by employing cheap labor, but if the latter, then even KittenAuth won't be able to stem the tide of spam blogs gaming keywords for clickfraud riches. Your move, Google.

Evite: Use Socializr or MyPunchbowl
The main problem with Evite is the uninformative email. "You are invited to Heather's Divorce Party," says Evite, with a personal message from the host but no actual information. To make a decision as a guest, I have to click over to Evite; that cramps my style if I'm trying to be at all productive with my inbox. Plus it's a pain when I'm en route to the party and need to double-check the address. If only I could just check my email on my phone, but no, all the info is trapped in Evite! The "send it to my phone" option is silly, as I probably won't remember to do that until I'm already away from my computer.

The site is also annoying to use: I can only export the event to iCal, RSVPing takes me to a useless page instead of back to the event, and the site is full of ads and unrelated links. Evite is the MySpace of invitations.

That's almost all fixed with Socializr and MyPunchbowl. Socializr sends a complete email with party time, location and information:

But the event page only lets guests export info to Outlook, not iCal, Google Calendar, or Yahoo Calendar. MyPunchbowl allows all of that, but although it leaves guests a pretty informative email, it leaves out the event location. (It's also cluttered with more "features" than I care about.) Because of that, I'm using Socializr for my next party.

YouTube: Use Vimeo
Seriously, why put anything on YouTube when Vimeo exists? Of all the alternative video sites — Veoh, Blip.tv, Revver — Vimeo is the best option for the average video maker (people with professional shows should also consider Blip.tv or VideoEgg). Here are YouTube's failures and how Vimeo beats them:

• Crap video quality: Remember the '90s, when online video was tiny and grainy? And then connections got faster and video was decently pretty again? And then YouTube made it all grainy again, with dissonant sound? Vimeo has better video quality, especially in its new HD format, which has 12 times the resolution of YouTube. (Those with pre-Intel Macs will have to watch the non-HD versions.) Viewers can also download the original video file.
• Ugly site: And ugly embeds. Not with Vimeo, which has a freshly updated embedded-video style that matches its slick, uncluttered web site.
• Horrible commenters: YouTube comments are spam and illiterate evaluations: "dis sux" or "lol." The video creator can either take hours to pick through all of them deleting bad comments, or ban comments altogether. Vimeo comments are not only readable, they're nearly all encouraging. Is the fantastic community only there because the site's so small? Who cares, it's not going to explode any time soon. It'll just steal the best creative users from YouTube.

An example of Vimeo's beauty:

Blogger: Use WordPress.com, Vox, or Tumblr
In its first few years, Blogger rocked; then like most Google acquisitions, it languished, until now it's a hive of spam blogs. Blogger isn't particularly heinous to use, it's just quite limiting. Now there are plenty of friendly blog interfaces for those of us who just want a simple blog with no mucking about in HTML.

WordPress.com is the most flexible, useful for people who want the power of WordPress without installing the whole thing on a server, or whatever people do to make their own WordPress blog (I've had a few, but I always needed someone else to set them up). There's room for HTML and custom CSS and stuff, so you can upgrade it. I Can Has Cheezburger is built on WordPress.com.

Vox is the new Blogger, as far as simplicity and friendliness. Pretty much no learning curve. It's designed to be the blog your mom can use. Lots of Vox blogs are happy and sunny; this one is also Warm 'n Fuzzy.

My favorite is Tumblr (which powers my personal site). This one's less about "dear diary" blogging and more "here's some stuff I found." The small input boxes encourage brevity, which is what your blog could use, isn't it?

Twitter: Use Pownce
I haven't stopped using Twitter. But I used to use it to ask questions when I needed a whole bunch of ideas ("Anyone know some songs about transvestites?"). Now I use Pownce, which lets people reply within a thread. It's like a comment thread without a blog post at the top, or a quick and easy mini-forum. It's also a more rewarding place to pimp your boring blog posts link to entertaining webpages.

Digg: Use StumbleUpon
What if you could get Digg-like traffic without suffering the wrath of Digg commenters? Try StumbleUpon, which asks for "reviews" instead of a stream of comments, forcing users to actually think before posting about a site. That gives StumbleUpon the same community advantage Vimeo has over YouTube.

Get your site "Stumbled" and you could get several thousand pageviews — not always as much as Digg, but without the "this sucks u suck LOOSER" commentary.

MapQuest: Use Google Maps
You already know Google Maps is the best, but apparently most folks still use MapQuest, despite its awkward input forms and such. But, well, those folks aren't you. So I guess we've got a little extra time here before the article runs out. Go spend it at Vimeo.

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. Seriously, Vimeo is like licking chocolate off the Venus de Milo.

• So, the new version of Blogger is finally out of beta! Yippee! But what about the dozens of other products, still stuck either in beta — even mainstays like Gmail — or in Google Labs? Just a few weeks ago, Valleywag readers said Joga Bonito will be the next to go. [BloggerBuzz]
• Michael Arrington is disappointed in the Wall Street Journal's "attack on blogs." Says the WSJ: "The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps." Ouch! [Crunchnotes]
• The most popular topics on Reddit? Politics and Internet & PC, apparently. [StatisticsFreak]
• Web 2.0 comes to the Catholic Church! Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley to start podcasting. [SFGate]
• The American Mac and PC were clearly better casted. [Apple via Zach Klein]

So it's only fair to show you what they missed.

Marissa Mayer: 155 friends
Yes, the VP of search products and user experience is turned on by candlelight. That should come in handy on her perfect first date, which ends with "talking until dawn." To Marissa, sleep is for other people. Does she ever actually use those silk pajamas that are ostensibly in her bedroom?

Eric Schmidt: 66 friends
The CEO doesn't share any romantic info (his wife wouldn't like that), though his favorite book, A World Lit Only By Fire, sounds close enough to candlelight. Surprise surprise, he calls himself a workaholic. (Surprise surprise, by Google's standards he isn't.)

Larry Page: 112 friends
One of co-founder Larry's listed styles is "alternative." Anyone else turned on by the idea of a shaggy, Nirvana-worshipping Larry Page?

Sergey Brin: 123 friends
Sadly, this is probably a diagram of his actual DNA. But the dude shares no info whatsoever. Smart move, Sergey.

Bill Coughran: 33 friends
The senior VP of engineering and research's favorite TV is "24 hour news." Yeesh. Engineers.

Jeff Huber: 252 friends
Yet another VP who loves "Blade Runner." Sense a pattern here?

George Reyes: 9 friends
Oof. The CFO title doesn't come with a few placeholder friends? No sense making fun of this guy — it'd be like kicking a very lonely puppy.

Jason Shellen: 232 friends
This dude deserves every friend he's got and more. One of the original engineers at Blogger (he came to Google along with Blogger maker Pyra), Jason lists his favorite Cuisinart as Kitchen Aid.

Eric Case: 94 friends
The new king of Blogger is no slouch either. "Television = consent manufacturing," he says. That's why the indie Eric Case reads obscure authors like Michael Crichton. (To be fair, he's a Bill Bryson and Victor Hugo fan too.)

There are the interesting Googlers. All the others aren't worth knowing.

The Google Connection: Google Employees on Orkut [Google Blogoscoped]

Jason to Meg: "I rented it at half-price. But at 6, we need to let a film crew through for 'Bruce Almighty Two.'"

Jason considers wearing this to the ceremony.

Who invited Jack Nicholson?

After the jump, Kottke and Meg catch Saturday night fever.

Photos by Eliot Shepard: Wedding [megnut on Flickr]

"Who's the dude?" "Some guy she found on the Internet."

Blogger Alaina Browne to husband and Six Apart VP Anil Dash: "Perfect, the photographer's here. Shut up and look noble."

Meg's dad will bust some caps in yo' ass, cracka.

It's somewhere between the Electric Slide and the Chicken Dance.

Actually, he was just checking if she'd spilled some wine.

Flickr's Stewart Butterfield, overcome with emotion, needs a hug and a good sit down.

Meg Hourihan dug up a pic (640x480 original) of her partner Evan Williams at Pyra Labs in their pre-Blogger days — ages before Google snapped up the little development company, and in the first golden age of idea whiteboards. Haven't tried calling that phone number at the top, but special love (and a comment account) to anyone with the nerve to do it.

Pyra olden days [Flickr, CC A-NC license]