14 DAY TRIAL // When your headquarters are the size of city block, you get to name the street you're on. Silicon Valley has somewhat of a tradition of handing out 'vanity' street addresses to the big tech companies housed there.
The latest to join the exclusive club is Facebook which has just gotten its hands on "Hacker Way," as the street inside its new Menlo Park headquarters has been renamed.
The main building is located at 1 Hacker Way, as TechCrunch reports, but other buildings in the campus get their own numbers.
That makes sense since the new Facebook campus is made up of several buildings on the site with more on the way at a nearby location.
Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it acquired the old Sun Microsystems campus and that it will re-purpose it to house all of its employees in the area, which had been scattered across several buildings in Palo Alto.
The old Sun campus used to reside at 10 Network Circle, but Facebook got to change the name along with its purchase. Interestingly, the street is called 10 Network Circle in Street View, but it has the correct name, Hacker Way in Maps.
Facebook has been cultivating the image of the hacker, you'll find the word scribbled on many of its office art or decorations.
At Facebook, hacker means a coder that works independently, albeit in a team, without getting bogged down in corporate paperwork, to find a solution to a problem.
Perhaps the most famous 'vanity' street name belongs to Apple, which resides at 1 Infinite Loop, named after a less-than-desired programming error.
But Apple is hardly the only one. Other big companies also get to name their streets, though most choose the less imaginative route.
For example, AOL has 22000 AOL Way, Dell has 1 Dell Way, Microsoft has 1 Microsoft Way and so on. There are those with more interesting choices like Apple's or Sun's. Genetech has 1 DNA Way, for example.