cliffchang
FF was acquired about 15 months ago, so that's about how long Paul was at Facebook.
Also, I imagine being a partner in YC is very much a fulltime job.
1) It could, potentially, provide some value to you as a user. Quora gets to suggest people to follow for you based on your Facebook friends, so your experience on there is seeded with relevant information.
2) Nothing you do on the site you signed in with is published to your Facebook profile, without your explicit consent on a dialog box.
Google search ads EXCEL in "Demand Fulfillment" - say you want need a plumber now since your toilet is overflowing. I don't think Facebook will ever beat Google here. Google sort of created this niche where they were better than any competitor that had ever existed.
Facebook, on the other hand, is better at demand generation. Consider advertisers who want to reach teenagers who would want to buy videogames - a new game is coming out, and they want you to know about it. Before, you'd have to find the TV shows that they would watch, or billboards that they would see, or queries that gaming-teens would search for, and advertise there. These are all competitive and difficult proxies for the audience you want to reach. Facebook is a much better place for that than Google.
In fact, you can imagine synergy between FB ads and Google ads. FB tells people, "you should listen to this band that you haven't heard of", and when you Google that band name, you see ads for places to buy tickets and albums.
It sounds like you're starting your 2nd year of college now, and most of your peers have pretty thin resumes, too. The fact that you have pursued personal projects beyond classwork already puts you ahead of the vast majority of candidates. Be sure to provide links to the source code for the projects you hacked together in your resume. Even though you don't think they're perfect, they show your passion, and that's what people are looking for.
In the cover letter, talk about how you discovered programming, how much you've learned in just 2.5 years, how much you want to learn still. I didn't start coding, really, until halfway into my freshman year, and I was still able to find internships.
Once your resume is strong enough (and providing links to good code that you wrote will look very good, for a college student), it's just the interview, and it doesn't seem like you're asking about that.
P.S.
Another way of doing things is getting to know some professors well (TA for them, ask them lots of questions, talk to them after class, etc.), and asking them to help you find an internship. A lot of companies trust professors' opinions of their students a lot more than resumes when deciding who to interview.
If you're being interviewed by a formal suit, though, don't go busting out the tux :-p. That's the top level.
re: self-evaluated multiple-choice - One thing I've done in these sorts of situations is to find concrete situations in which I can say, "when I was in this specific situation that the question was asking about, I did X", which hopefully minimizes the amount of "oh man i want to be an extrovert" sort of answering.
...but yes, agreed, this is really just sort of a goofy little thing, but it's fun and still potentially a bit interesting.
We had a vague guideline at work that if any algorithm took you more than 3 lines, you were doing it wrong.
Legend has it that Arthur Whitney wrote the compiler in a few files - a.c, b.c, c.c, up to around q.c, with each file being exactly 52 lines and 80 columns so they could all fit on one page.
See "no stinking loops" at http://www.nsl.com/ which has some great examples of really good K code (scroll down a bit).
$23.6 bn in 2009 (don't have 2010 numbers, and don't want to speculate).
I don't know how many engineers they have, but I've heard the number 10,000 bandied about.
The below says about 20,600 employees total, so my hunch is that 10k might be a little bit high. http://investor.google.com/documents/20100331_google_10Q.htm...
Given the 23.6 bn is probably low for 2010, and 10,000 engineers is probably a bit high, the resulting value of 2.36 million is a lowball estimate. The real number is probably closer to, oh, say, $2,750,000 / engineer :D