Facebook is moving from a cluster of buildings in Palo Alto to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, and the New York Times has an interesting story today looking at the social media giant's approach to architecture and design. The 57-acre site is very much self-contained -- some nearby merchants aren't even aware that Facebook is coming -- and the goal is apparently to make it feel like a city unto itself. No color-coordinated buildings, but rather an "urban streetscape" with some of the "random" elements that make cities interesting.

It all sounds very nice, but as I read the piece with its repeated references to the campus reflecting the company's culture, I got to thinking: what is the company's culture anyway? I have a sense of the culture at Google - all engineering, all the time - and at Apple, and at Microsoft. In the case of the latter two, maybe its because I once covered those companies as a beat reporter. But Facebook, to me, remains very opaque from a cultural standpoint. The company has hired lots of Google people and is certainly engineering-driven, but I don't know much beyond that.

A lot of successful companies reflect the personalities of their founders, Microsoft in its heyday being perhaps the best case-in-point. Is this the case at Facebook, and if so, what is Mark Zuckerberg really like?