It bothers me that TC writers, when called out on their bias, claim to just be mere "bloggers" who are supposed to be expose their bias so you know where they're coming from, but now they're claiming to be holy "journalists".
HTML, JS, CSS, PHP, and Python all have steady increases, and ruby is mostly stable. It could just be that focus is more on the web (HTML in particular seems to have taken a biggish jump mid-2009 - related to HTML5?)
I think you may misunderstand what signing in with Facebook does.
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.
Nothing you do on the site you signed in with is published to your Facebook profile, without your explicit consent on a dialog box
The trouble with this statement is that some users (myself included) don't believe (a) this is true even when they say it's true, or (b) that if it's true today it will still be true tomorrow.
Such paranoid users are worried that FB will make a privacy policy change that turns the privacy off "as a benefit to users," and the opt-out checkbox will be buried seven links deep. I try to use FB's controls to make my FB stuff fairly private, but I still operate on the assumption that one day FB will break my assumptions about what is or isn't shared.
The recent "Places" launch confirmed it for me. If I hadn't read someone else's blog post, I wouldn't have known that simply refusing to opt into places wasn't enough, I also had to explicitly block friends from checking me into locations.
I don't mean to personally call you out but this mindset is entirely flawed for this argument. If you're so worried about keeping your private things private, don't put anything you're not completely fine with being public on facebook. According to your logic they don't owe you any real promise of privacy, right?
I don't know what they owe me, but I do know what I do and do not trust them to do. And on that basis I decide what I will and will not share with them.
Which brings us full-circle back tot the point of the post:
When a third-party application uses FB as its authentication mechanism, it gives the appearance of asking its users to trust FB with everything they do on that application.
So yeah, I don't put anything on FB that I can't handle becoming public some day. That doesn't mean I want it to be public, but I wouldn't knowingly put something private on there.
And that extends to third-party apps using FB for anything at all. I can't ever imagine using a linked-in kind of application that uses FB authentication. I'm not going to put certain business contacts and my business relationship with them where FB might be able to scrape the data.
I'm not dating, but if I did I wouldn't use a service that used FB for authentication. Or a personal money management application.
And my message to third party apps using FB for authentication is to take this into account. I won't say "don't," you know your market, maybe they don't care. But at least have your eyes open to people who might think twice if whatever you're managing for them might be sensitive.
If you think of advertising as "traditional advertising" and "internet advertising", then FB and Google are certainly rivals. However, in pure marketing terms, they are actually very different.
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.
Google has AdSense / Doubclick network. This is a huge number of eyeballs with many banner types. And Google knows my basic browsing history via cookies and my entire search history. At least for me, Google knows exactly what I'm interested in, tend to purchase, and tend to click on. Facebook knows my basic demographic profile, which isn't really that valuable. I'd say the value of Google's data is about 50 times Facebooks.
Agree completely, in fact I sort said some of these things at another message on this thread. An like I said in the parent, Google vs. FB is not a fight that I particular believe, but I was hoping to shed some light on why people make this connection.
Google has money in abundance, they're putting millions on social projects, hoping to have some of FB's thunder (and data). While I don't know if Google will ever succeed, every social feature added by Google is a point of conflict with FB, thus feeding the "there's a war going on" opinion of some people.
I'm not sure your plumber example really works out. Facebook could hypothetically tell you that "Your friends X and Y used plumber's Z services, and liked it!", which is much more persuasive information than a generic ad.
I interview plenty of people, for fulltime positions and internships, and, basically, yes, you can definitely be hired.
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.
The rule of thumb to use in most interviewing situations, not just Software Engineering, is to dress one "degree" up from your interviewers. If you're being interviewed by jeans and a T-shirt, wear a dress shirt and slacks. If you're being interviewed by a dress shirt and slacks, you can't go wrong with a casual suit.
If you're being interviewed by a formal suit, though, don't go busting out the tux :-p. That's the top level.
