It's hard to blame them. Still, some of the pictures compiled by TechCrunch — from Twitter, naturally — have us scratching our heads. Click on any of the first three items in the gallery below to see what we mean.

The mirror in the toilet stall. Bill Farner, who took this shot, is confused about this oddly-located "vanity" mirror's purpose. Can't say we blame him!

The lone "at" symbol on this wall. Wouldn't "@wall" be more appropriate? Or "@couch!"By Ryan King.

The DJ booth in the dining room. It's not just lunch, it's a party! By @caroline.

DJ booth in context (it's in the back). By Bill Farner.

This isn't one of the "weird" things, but it's noteworthy because of the subject: That's Ev Williams' wife Sara Morishige. So this, presumably, is the CEO's own office. Anyone know what the "795" is about? In any case, it's generous of the new mom and longtime designer to handle the interior of her husband's office. That's going to be a crowded wall, judging from the density of what's up so far. By @caroline.

Business Insider has the full, 29-picture photo tour. Google has been outfitting its various offices like this for a while, but it's always an eye-openingly retro experience to actually see the office trappings of the hugely profitable company. Below, find our five favorites, the ones that really take us back to the days of Webvan and Pets.com. We mock, of course, because we're insanely jealous.

The reception area is straightforward enough...

Google takes a systematic approach to free snacks. A less successful dot-com would just have pre-wrapped candy and open/stale cereal boxes and so forth.

"We've hired a substitute short-order cook named David Chang. Apologies in advance if he screws up your lunch."

Of course there are razor scooters.

The requisite exposed brick. Plus a can of of kerosene in case you should ever feel disgruntled. Don't be evil!

Socketside heard Cruise was the buyer of an $18 million mansion in the ritzy Sea Cliff neighborhood. NBC Bay Area soon pointed out that, if that's true, Cruise's neighbors would be Robin Williams, Cheech Marin and the guitarist from Metallica. It's like the Bay Area's very own stunted little fog-swept Beverly Hills. But many locals will remember that the Church of Scientology was on the hunt for "apparent expansion" space starting in 2006, nosing around the once countercultural North Beach neighborhood.

So is Cruise, the alleged inspirer of Scientology beat-downs, spearheading a renewed expansion campaign by the cult to which he belongs? Maybe, or maybe said SF mansion is just being bought by another local tech exec like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, per a SocketSite update:

Another reader quickly notes the mailing address for the purchasing LLC ("Tawaraya") is that of "a high-end accounting firm in Walnut Creek" which happens to advise Larry Ellison (amongst others). And The Real Estalker adds, "Tawaraya is a super posh and searingly expensive, 300-year old ryokan–which is essentially a Japanese bed and breakfast sort of place–located in Kyoto" which is rather Ellison-esque.

Oh great, more Larry Ellison dick waving. Don't we at least deserve some fresh megalomaniac mansion owners, out here?

Yahoo's proposed new HQ in the Silicon Valley town of Santa Clara would be big enough to house 7,000 additional staff, according to former Valleywag Nicholas Carlson, at Business Insider. The company continues to try and push permits for the plan through the city's approval process despite plenty of available office space in existing Silicon Valley buildings.

We've seen this movie before. It does not end well:

• Fox Interactive's $350 million new HQ near Los Angeles was said to be the biggest area development deal in 25 years. Amid layoffs, Fox cancelled its move as the building was being finished.
  
• Internet conglomerate IAC finished its new Gotham headquarters in early 2007. Within months came a plan to break up the company.
  
• Amid the dot-com boom, network technology company Cisco Systems planned a controversial Silicon Valley megacampus for 20,000 workers. In late 2001 it scaled that back to plans for an office that could — maybe! — hold 3,000 to 9,000 workers.
  
• Handheld device maker Palm had dot-com-era plans for a 39-acre campus; the collateral alone on the project was $238 million. By mid-2001 Palm announced it would sell that land.
  
• From late 2000 to late 2001, USA Today reported, "Intel, Excite At Home and Inktomi... shelved or cut back plans for new plants or offices."

It's worth noting that Yahoo's plans have been underway since three years ago, when the company bought the land in question for $112 million. Seasoned real estate developers know it often makes more sense to obtain city approvals before canceling a project, since the approvals can usually be transferred to a new owner, making the underlying land more valuable. So Bartz is not necessarily at fault for Yahoo's hubristic plans. But that doesn't make her any less likely to be the victim of what they portend.

Or so we hear from a College Park tipster claiming to be familiar with the residences of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (paper wealth: $2 billion) and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim (estimated wealth: $64 million). Public records confirm that Karim lives in the two-by-twelve-block Palo Alto neighbohood, adjacent to Stanford University; records indicate Zuckerberg has for months occupied property nearby, albeit in the form of Facebook's new headquarters, a short walk away from Karim.

But Zuckerberg is now a neighbor in a much more real sense, according to our tipster, renting a home right next door to Karim (as in side by side) on the same street. The brief commute would be one good reason for living there. Another: It looks like a leafy, laid back area, according to the ample photographs of the street on Google Maps. Based on Karim's address this is the block they share:

Why are Zuckerberg's neighbors ratting out his address? His employees are taking up the parking, and, we're told, residents complain that the fast-growing company is not providing enough spots (they're apparently not mollified by a proposal to begin requiring residential permits in some areas). You should probably get on that, Mark; these people know where you live.

In the meantime, local residents are missing the real outrage: That, in their 'hood, even insanely wealthy startup founders live in what most American suburbanites would consider modest pads.

"We're building a modern house that we hope will be done by 2010," Williams told the Times. Instead, the couple moved into a pre-built modern Victorian earlier this year.

When news surfaced earlier this month that Williams and his wife had bought a Noe Valley home, we wrote that our best guess was that the house was an interim mansion. Why else would the couple be "selling one house, buying a second and building a third?"

After all, Williams' new Noe Valley house was finished and put on the market in October 2008, more than three months before Williams said in the Times that he was building his own house. The deed transferred to Williams this past April, according to property records, and since then there has reportedly been some interior remodeling.

Williams wrote in to tell us that he's not juggling homes: "We were building a house." No more.

We've updated our original post.

(Pic: by JD Lasica)

That, at least, is the best explanation we can come up with for why Ev and Sara Williams are selling one house, buying a second and building a third, all at the same time. Their old penthouse was a two-bedroom in a gritty part of San Francisco Mission District, while the home they just bought reportedly has three bedrooms, a guest house and is in the yuppie-family haven of Noe Valley. The acquisition, reported today by SocketSite, can be confirmed with a search on the records website PropertyShark:

The Noe property, on the market for a full year and designed by architect Owen Kennerly, seems like a sensible place to wait out the construction of the new home; a comfortable interim house like this should allow the couple to complete their own house without rushing the job in response to the pressures of a new baby, fast-growing internet startup and cramped apartment. Plus, they got it for 16 percent under list.

That, at least, is what we'd tell ourselves if we had $2.4 million to drop on a temporary pad.

UPDATE: Williams writes, ""We're not building another house. (Also, the penthouse isn't in the Mission.)" The first assertion is very odd: The Times quoted Williams in March saying "we're building a modern house;" at that point the house below had been finished and listed for sale for four months. Perhaps the project proved to overwhelming. We've asked for clarification.

UPDATE: Williams writes, "we *were* building a house."

Pictures of the house below via SocketSite.

Front.

Kitchen.

Guest house.

That's interior designer Ken Fulk's good fortune, according to an article in this month's C magazine (think W for California — the article is not online but you can always order a subscription). Ridiculously wealthy startup founders just hand Fulk large bundles of money — or even a blank check — and set him loose. Why second guess your designer when your life is spent buried in software subroutines or analyzing internet business models?

Mark Pincus, the Harvard MBA founder of local networking site Tribe.net and social gaming network Zynga, and his wife "never consulted with their decorator on so much as a paint chip or swath of fabric" for their Cole Valley home. Programmer Michael Birch, who with wife Xori sold the social network Bebo to AOL for a ridiculous $850 million, gave Fulk an "elastic budget" for re-doing their $30 million Pacific Heights mansion, specifying only that Michael wanted a full-service pub imported from London.

How did the projects work out? Wonderfully, if you're in love with electric-blue lacquered walls, stuffed animal heads, zebra-print rugs and muddy-looking busts on your coffee table. Examples of Fulk's handiwork, from C, in the gallery below. The last item includes a description of Fulk's insane closet.

Tribe.net founder Pincus' place in Cole Valley.

Beebo founder Michael Birch's mansion in Pacific Heights.

Designer Fulk. According to C, his own loft is decorated with "lots of taxidermy, vintage furniture and portraits. Instead of a closet, his clothes hang on a rack sheathed in black bags to protect them from the sun. Each bag is affixed with a Polaroid of the outfit inside. His name is printed on the bags as if it were a fashion label."

Near the start of the financial crisis, Perkins began trying to sell his epic yacht, the Maltese Falcon, seen in the attached 60 Minutes clip. He also put his palatial, $20 million Belvedere home on the market.

Things are now looking decidedly up. The uber venture capitalist, who co-founded top-tier VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is now said to have yanked the Belvedere house off the market. And he's scooped up yet another pad: Perkins bought a $9 million, 4,800-square-foot penthouse atop the brand new, 60-story Millennium Tower in San Francisco. The story, first reported by the blog Front Steps, was confirmed by Bloomberg, to whom Perkins said, "It's a good time to buy things other than paper."

Perkins had reasons to be so optimistic: His condo buy was reportedly financed by the sale of that yacht, which had languished on the market for more than a year. Billionaires, it seems, are finally spending again. Hallelujah.

Business Insider has some nice pictures of the building, inside and out.

(Pic: One of Millennium Tower's "Grand Residences," via Millennium Tower.)

Stone told Tavis Smiley last night about an early trial of his microblogging service. It made him laugh: While co-founder Evan Williams was sipping Pinot Noir and getting a massage in wine country, Stone and his wife were finding awful things under the carpet and cursing their purchase of the William Wurster-designed two bedroom — the same two bedroom they're now trying to sell. It's a funny story, but perhaps not the best way to move property in a down market.

Hopefully for Twitter's investors, Stone will take a more straightforward approach to marketing his unprofitable website; below, he confirms to Smiley that Twitter wants to accelerate revenue growth by the end of this year, as indicated in the February business plan leaked to TechCrunch by a hacker, and describes some ways that might happen, including analytics for small businesses and verified Twitter accounts.

Jobs has called his 30-room hacienda "one of the biggest abominations of a house I've ever seen." But Gordon Smythe, founder of Propel Partners, is a fan of the house's architect, George Washington Smith, and will elsewhere reassemble the structure, minus an addition added to the structure after it was built.

Maybe Smythe knows what he's talking about: his firm invests in both technology and real estate, and local preservationists say he's acquiring a national treasure.

Jobs, whose computer products tend toward clean, elegant lines, is planning a smaller house, which may or may not replace his existing Palo Alto estate. Given Jobs' notoriously obsessive approach to design, we do not envy his contractors.

(Pic: Jonathan Haeber)

It has to be Peter Mattis, co-creator of the open-source image editor GIMP and a Google engineer. The clues are all right there in the Times article. A tipster helped lay them out for us.

"Harken Pretty" anagram: The apartment, once thought to be sold to movie stars Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, instead went to an LLC called "Harken Pretty," which is an anagram of the first names of the buyers, according to the Times. Mattis is married to Kathryn Kimball; the couple are pictured in the image at left, taken from Kimball's Facebook profile (here's Peter's profile). "Harken Pretty" is the most coherent anagram for the couple's first names.

Young family: The buyers have a "young family," just like the trio of Mattis, Kimball and baby in the picture above.

Used to live in SoHo: The Times' mystery buyers want to escape "the hustle and bustle and celebrity of SoHo, where the family now lives." Mattis and Kimball used to live at 56 Crosby Street, according to sales records, before putting the property up for sale earlier this year. (Mattis implied in the Times that some of his coworkers might be jealous of his new home; perhaps they could take some relief in the fact he had to cut the price of his old home twice, reducing the asking price by a total of $650,000.)

Money to burn: The new apartment costs about $3.5 million more than the current listing price of the old apartment. But judging by Mattis and Kimball's political donations, they have plenty surplus cash to spend. Campaign records show donations to three different candidates in the last presidential election by the couple: $2,300 to libertarian Republican Ron Paul; $4,600 to Demorat Hillary Clinton; and $4,600 to Democrat Barack Obama in Mattis' name and another $2,300 in his wife's name (see here and here).

We've emailed Mattis at Google, Facebook and two old Berkeley email addresses. We'll let you know if we hear back. UPDATE: Mattis called; he wasn't happy to see his family plastered on a website and went out of his way to say he wasn't telling us anything on the record. (The photos above were taken from the public front of Mattis and Kimball's Facebook profiles.)

Okay, so maybe not Bazillionaires, but they were definitely around before the Google IPO. Reports the Times on who actually ended up on what was rumored to be the pad SJP and Matthew Broderick were migrating to from the West Village: Google employees who declined to be named. And why all the anonymity?

The buyers asked that their names not be published - not to keep autograph seekers at bay, but because of the office culture at Google. It seems that the first generation of employees, who earned millions from stock options awarded when the company went public, sit side by side with colleagues who were hired later.

Ouch. Somewhere in the Google offices, someone who lives in a mansion is sitting side-by-side with someone stuck in a one-bedroom in the land of the hoi polloi. Meanwhile, the Times took this time to stick their tounge out at, uh, lesser outlets who rested their reporting on purely speculative efforts:

Ina Treciokas, a spokesman for Ms. Parker, said that as of last week she had received only two calls about the town house, and had unequivocally denied that Ms. Parker had any connection to it. She also said that none of the scores of entertainment and real estate Web sites that picked up the story bothered to call to ask about Ms. Parker's real estate plans.

In your face, entertainment sites! But it gets better: the Times also took a moment to swipe at what's - truth be told - another borough that isn't Manhattan. Clearly fit for a Google employee, not movie stars. Duh.

In the last few days, real estate and entertainment bloggers and columnists have been twittering en masse over rumors and reports that the ultimate Manhattan girl, Sarah Jessica Parker, and her husband, Matthew Broderick, had decided to abandon Manhattan, and their 20-foot-wide West Village town house, for a larger place in what, truth be told, is still an outer borough.

We may be a speculative entertainment blogger, but the reporters at the Times are still, truth be told, kinda assholes. No matter where they live.

Further reading: Brooklyn Loses Sarah Jessica Parker, Gains a Super Rich Googler [All Things Digital]

He's her uncle. Or so we're told.

Last week, Cityfile noticed a Blockshopper report that Lerer had gone in with Bartolomeo on $1,025,000 apartment in Carnegie Hill. They thought that was pretty weird—Huffington Post doesn't pay its own writers, but its co-founder buys real estate for People writers? The mystery deepened when Cityfile started digging, and found that Lerer helped Joey's sister Stephanie buy a $1.25 million apartment on the Upper West Side in March. What is it with Lerer and the Bartolomeo girls, Cityfile wondered. (Well, the Stephanie Bartolomeo connection makes some sense—she works in ad sales at Huffington Post and worked with Lerer when he was at AOL. But still.)

Do the Bartolomeo girls possess some horribly embarrassing secret that they've been using to blackmail Lerer? Is Lerer carrying on a tawdry affair with both sisters at the same time?

Things only got stranger when Cityfile put in calls to get an answer—first Joey stonewalled, then Lerer stonewalled, then a Huffington Post flack stonewalled. No one would answer the simple question: Why is Ken Lerer buying apartments for Joey and Stephanie Bartolomeo?

Anyway, the answer is: Because he's their uncle. Or so a source who knows them told us. Either their stepfather's brother or their mother's brother; our source isn't quite sure. So there's that. Mystery solved. We could use an uncle like that.

The only remaining mystery, of course, is why Bartolomeo and Lerer would insist on being so cagey about a mundane real estate transaction.

We e-mailed Joey to confirm, but haven't heard back yet.

UPDATE: "Yes, he's our uncle and he's the best uncle in the galaxy," writes Bartolomeo. We concur.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Silicon Alley Insider, which got its hands on inside footage of the new digs, reports the social network has rechristened the cafeteria "Cafe X." How edgy!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The lounge retains a certain retro industrial chic. Which is to say it hasn't changed all that much.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The picnic area looks nice, if you're into, you know, sunlight. Just remember to stay off the neighbors' lawns!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The work areas are certainly colorful.

Curiously, there are no pictures of what's become of the old building's sea of cubicles. Judging from the video, it looks like they've become a sea of desks. At least the monitors are nice and large, allowing employees to tune out their surroundings like so many other office workers: By getting lost in Facebook.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

Yes, Valleywag has gotten Zuck an office befitting Facebook's dwindling cool: a '50s-looking former Hewlett-Packard building in a forgotten corner of Palo Alto near the Stanford campus. (Okay, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg helped us get it for him. Thanks, Sheryl!)

Facebook closed early today to finish the move. The company reopens Monday in its new, dreary digs. What better way to note Zuckerberg's now permanently lost youth?

(Birthday card by Richard Blakeley)

Page, whose home address was accidentally revealed by a pro-privacy group last year, lives in Old Palo Alto. With homes more than a century old, it's what passes for historic in Silicon Valley, at any rate.

The new, 6,000-sq. ft. house observes all the green shibboleths: organic building materials, low-volatility paint, and so forth. (Never mind that lighting and heating such a large house will inevitably have more environmental impact than a more modest dwelling.)

Records for Santa Clara County show that 111 Waverley Oaks, a property adjoining Page's current residence at 111 Waverley Oaks, was transferred in September 2008. It was most recently assessed at a value of $3.3 million.

But the real environmental impact is on the neighbors, Palo Alto Weekly reports:

Ralph Britton, a retired electronic engineer and board member of Palo Alto Stanford Heritage, was walking the neighborhood when he noticed demolitions on four separate properties in Page's block.

"I noticed a house coming down, walked and saw another, and realized they were contiguous," Britton said. He described one house as elegant with a lot of land around it, a swimming pool in back and nice landscaping — much of which is still there. Another former home around the corner he called "imposing."

Britton's description of the property matches a satellite photo of the property available on Page's own Google Maps. Britton goes on to describe heavy construction on the block:

... neighbors are also concerned with the mess of construction, as well as possible damage to streets from heavy trucks.

"There's constant noise and confusion; when one finishes, the other starts," Britton said.

But fences are already up on the Page property, including mesh around protected trees, in preparation for construction. The work cannot begin until the city approves a permit.

A spokesman for Page told the Weekly that Page would seek a permit this week. Seems a bit late, with construction already underway. But since when have billionaires had to obey the law?

We doubt it. Facebook board member Marc Andreessen once cited a paper on business magazine covers as contrarian indicators:

Headlines from featured stories in Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes were collected for a 20-year period to determine whether positive stories are associated with superior future performance and negative stories are associated with inferior future performance for the featured company. "Superior" and "inferior" were determined in comparison with an index or another company in the same industry and of the same size.

Statistical testing implied that positive stories generally indicate the end of superior performance and negative news generally indicates the end of poor performance.

So what does that mean for Facebook? In this case, "superior performance" means losing money on an estimated $280 million in revenue last year — and facing more problems as the site grows.

We hear the company is even having trouble managing something as simple as a move to its new headquarters, a soulless office park facing a residential neighborhood on the other side of Palo Alto, Calif. from its current downtown digs. Local residents recently received a newsletter informing them that the move, scheduled to happen this quarter, was pushed back to April because of ongoing renovations:

There's the apartment at 133 E. 64th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side. But there's also the beach house in Montauk, which VirtualGlobeTrotting spotted via Microsoft Virtual Earth. Decisions, decisions!

Google already has an office in Washington, D.C., where its lobbyists cool their heels. But today, the overgrown search engine opened up a 30-Googler outpost in the part of town where the real money is made — Reston, Va., part of the string of office parks which runs from the Potomac to Dulles International, home to an endless number of government contractors.

The federal government has jumped on the outsourcing trend, and hands out contracts left and right to outfits which do work so government employees don't have to. Google's hoping to score some of that cash. It doesn't have much to offer: custom website search tools, Google Maps, and Web-based email and office apps are about it. None of them have proven to be big moneymakers for Google.

Not that it matters! Just having an office in the area to act as a cash bucket is all Google needs to do. Our president-to-be has long had a mancrush on Google. Besides writing it up in his book, Obama modeled his campaign operations after Google, chose the Googleplex as the site where he unveiled his "innovation agenda," and appointed Google CEO Eric Schmidt to a council of economic advisors. When Obama unveils his Works Progress Administration 2.0, you know Larry and Sergey will somehow get a piece. Why not? Google seems to get a cut of all the rest of the action.

Here's a clip of Obama at Google in 2007: