For fast-growing technology start-ups, there are many approaches to employee hiring and retention.

Two of the more successful ones, Facebook and Zappos, have very different methods, each with different goals: Facebook wants to hire entrepreneurs even if that means they will eventually leave, while Zappos wants to hire the best people to fit its culture and figure out how to keep them.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, said at a talk this weekend at Startup School, a Berkeley, Calif., event organized by Y Combinator, that Facebook seeks to hire entrepreneurial “hackers”–people who want to build something new–even though they may not want to stay for long. The company is focused on technology and tilts its hiring toward engineers, even for people in non-technical roles such as marketing, he said.

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Nonprofit organizations seeking to harness Facebook can get the most bang for their buck by using fan pages in addition to groups, streamlining their app usage and livening things up, one of its marketing execs said Friday.

Pages operate like profiles for organizations or businesses, can only be created by official representatives and can add applications, while groups are unofficial and can be created by any user. Relying on groups, which have been available longer, is one of the biggest mistakes nonprofits make, said Randi Zuckerberg, who works on marketing and nonprofit initiatives and is co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister. “You lose a lot of the incredible viral power.”

Because fan pages are official, it’s also easier for Facebook to take down fake ones, she said, as opposed to groups, which can be run by enthusiasts.

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Facebook plans to grow headcount by as much as 50 percent amid a surplus of engineering talent, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg. “No one else has been hiring,” he said. “”It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”

Facebook currently has 1,000 employees.

Zuckerberg said the company aims to eventually have 1 billion users, though he declined to give a time frame. He said he expects social networks to become as essential as Web browsers and operating systems.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will take to Oprah Winfrey’s couch today. What to expect? Questions about the economy? Mark’s not-so-secret Twitter account? The latest redesign?

Here’s what we’re hearing: Oprah and three guests–Oprah’s best friend Gayle King, actress Ali Wentworth and actor Mark Consuelos–will interview Mark and show a demo of the show’s new page on Facebook. A celebrity Facebook addict might Skype in to talk up the service as well, although that’s still a little TBD.

Another thing likely to be on the agenda: those nitpicky Facebook etiquette questions and some user stories to back them up.

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Why should location-based social networks be worried about Google (GOOG)? Because its new Latitude product was able to gain over a million users in just a week, Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told an audience at the Mobile World Congress today.

Latitude is Google’s service that uses your location to place you on a Google Map. If you have friends who are also using the service, you can see how close they are to you on your map and read their status updates. It’s a similar idea to what start-ups like Loopt and Pelago’s Whrrl do.

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Five major U.K. carriers are banding together to pool customer data so that it can be put into a giant database and then be used to sell advertising, The Register reports today. How long do you think it will take before this “database” idea lands on American shores? First they charge you hundreds of dollars for calls, then they sell you for pennies.

This is no different than, say, Phorm, NebuAd or any of the other tricks being cooked up by service providers in a desperate attempt to recreate Google’s business model. In the process, they are playing loose and fast with people’s privacy. Jeez, no wonder people hate their phone companies.

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Facebook’s announcement that they are opening up API access to user’s status updates (and more) is big news. The status update has become the ultimate social gesture. You could see this coming if you were watching carefully. All last year, Facebook, who is the leader in social networking and will continue to be as far as I can tell, focused on morphing the user experience, first to the news feed and ultimately to the status update as the primary user experience.

But Facebook did not invent the status update. I honestly don’t know where the status update started but for me it was AIM where I first was asked to leave a short note telling people what I was doing. I’ve heard Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter, talk many times about his inspirations for Twitter and one of them was the status message in AIM.

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There’s something about the crisp autumn air that brings out the philosopher in Mark Zuckerberg. At this week’s Web 2.0 Summit, the Facebook founder mused, according to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

Hansell dubs this Zuckerberg’s Law. But I believe it’s actually Zuckerberg’s Second Law. Zuckerberg’s First Law, enunciated on another fall day almost precisely one year ago, took this elemental form: “Once every hundred years media changes.”

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John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media, decided to have a little bit of speculative fun onstage Thursday with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit. It’s the sort of “speculative fun” that could give tech bloggers a gossip-overload headache for weeks to come: Battelle decided to throw some fuel on the “Facebook might buy Twitter” fire. Which, as far as I can tell, is a relatively new addition to the rumor-roasting pit.

“Is Twitter just a feature of Facebook?” Battelle prodded. Facebook, after all, has its own “status” feature that arguably competes with microblogging services like Twitter and FriendFeed.

Zuckerberg answered cryptically. “Oh, that’s tough.”

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Allow me to propose something crazy. Tech companies should start charging people to use their services. No, seriously. Let’s take the biggest example of a Web site that has no clear path to profitability: Facebook. The social network attracts more than 100 million “active users” around the world, but as of now–as even its founder Mark Zuckerberg admits–it’s still looking for a “business model” (that is, a way to make tons more money than it spends).

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It hasn’t even been a month since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a German blog that growth, not monetization, was the priority for the social-networking site. In fact, he even went so far as to say that he didn’t see a revenue plan coming into play for three more years.

But now, as TechCrunch digs up info on Facebook’s financials, it appears that Facebook may not even make it to 2011 unless they can drum up more cash–either through an accelerated revenue model or more investment dollars before the entire global economy erodes further. In response, Facebook basically responds by telling VentureBeat that it’s doing just fine–thank you very much–while other sources say that something must be wrong with the Techcrunch calculator.

Recognizing that advertising on Facebook has offered “dismal” returns, some bloggers (Techmeme) are suggesting that maybe a subscription model–nothing too crazy, mind you–might be in order. At least one has said that the only thing holding Facebook back from imposing fees is a lack of guts.

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I read with great interest your recent interview with Kara Swisher at the D6 Conference. I was particularly struck by your answer to Kara Swisher’s question about whether Facebook, the popular social-networking site you created, can be sold by your venture capital co-owners without your approval. Your response: “I don’t think so.”

Your answer made me think of something my own professor at London Business School once said to me: “The day you take a venture capital investment is the day you sell your company.” Venture capital firms are not Warren Buffett–they have limited-term funds and compensation mechanisms that encourage them to exit their transactions once a company reaches maturity.

So, is it true that your co-owners can sell without you or otherwise push through an initial public offering of Facebook without your approval as chief executive officer?

Well, the answer is maybe.

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