Image: facebook.com

Facebook is more than just a place to waste time and follow friends – it’s also a place to find iPhone engineers.

At least, that seems to be what Apple (AAPL) is hoping. The company today used the Facebook Marketplace to list this opening for an iPhone software engineer, who would work on the iPhone’s e-mail functions.

Image: http://store.apple.com

If its online traffic is any guide, Apple (AAPL) had a pretty decent quarter.

The maker of iPods, iPhones and Macs grew its online traffic 18 percent compared to a year earlier, from a monthly average of 36.6 million unique visitors to 43 million, according to Nielsen Online. Total minutes at the site grew 22 percent, from 7 billion in calendar Q3 2006 to 8.6 billion in calendar Q3 2007.

Nielsen also said that in September, Apple’s online traffic ranked number one in its category, hardware manufacturers.

It’s the walk-up to the CTIA show in San Francisco, and Mark Collins, VP Consumer Data, AT&T Wireless (T), is on stage talking about Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and other developments that are changing the wireless game.

Flash-based models such as the new iPod touch are increasingly upstaging Apple’s hard drive-based players. Photo: Jon Fortt

In the iPod’s world, storage isn’t the selling point it used to be.

That’s one clear lesson from the sales rankings at the Apple Store, which posts a regularly updated list of the most popular iPod models. Though the iPod classic, which uses a hard drive to store music and video, offers a whopping 80 gigabytes of storage for $249, it is being outsold by the iPod touch. This, despite the fact that the touch has a tenth of the storage space and costs $50 more.

Why is the touch beating the classic? For one, the iPod touch has the benefit of good looks – it’s almost identical to the iPhone, this year’s must-have gadget. The touch also has a large display, built-in WiFi and web browsing. (The iPod touch is isn’t Apple’s best-selling model; number-one is the slim iPod nano, which starts at $149. It doesn’t use a hard drive either.)