I agree with bobds. It's retarded to worry about scrapers. You're better off focusing on doing your own thing. Large sites get scrapped and cloned all the time. At the end of the day, it's better to be focused on what you do rather than the clones.
In addition to what steveklabnik said, it's also nice that you can integrate all of the Google App services into your system and quickly and conveniently work online and share things via Docs and Calendar by company domain. It makes it super convenient. While there are some certains on privacy, I don't feel the threat outweighs the benefit. It's not like Google is sniffing around to know what you do via your personal email and stuff. They are using that data to target ads. And to be honest, that doesn't matter to me as much.
Phishing emails would be a good start. I have the same setup as well. It makes more sense to have it forwarded and labeled coming in rather than give away your real email. This way if someone sends you fake mail to your daily use email but its not labeled from one of the secondary accounts you use to actually run your personal stuff, you know it's balony.
It's unfortunate he didn't beat them to the punch and patent it himself putting him in control. Not sure what he's trying to achieve out of all this and it may seem a bit cliche to say consult an attorney but that is probably what he should do that this point to see what his options are if he wishes to recoup anything out of this (and I don't mean just money aka rights, etc)...
1. Finding a job in this economy is difficult. If you're on the verge of graduating, find something to back up before you up and walk even if that was a consideration.
2. Always negotiate. Explain that when you started, you just finished high school. Now, years later with a lot more experience and a better understanding and nearly with a degree under your belt, you'd like to negotiate for pay. It isn't unreasonable to ask. Base on their response, you can decide what to do from there.
3. I think in the long run, depending on how the above two scenario plays out, you should be bright enough to play with the options you're given. But as you've said, you're broke, out of school soon, will probably go into repayment for student loans if you took any, and unless you got something else lined up, I wouldn't purposely fudge this and think of it as either or. Negotiate and talk to them. Figure out your choice after you've figured out what your options are.
I've lived in Portland Oregon, Seattle Washington, Dallas Texas, and San Francisco as well as Silicon Valley and I can honestly say living in SF or Silicon Valley is way more expensive. Rent probably averages about $1700-$2300 for a decent one bedroom apartment and more for two bedroom per month.
Utilities are about the same everywhere you live. Public transportation is a bit spendier than every other city I've lived in (Caltrain and BART costs). Unsure about the Bus, it's probably comparable.
Sales Tax is ridiculously higher here than anywhere I've been. If you live in the city and eat out, expect an addition 3-4% health tax charged at most restaurants.
Parking sucks in the city. Street cleaning tickets of $53 to $103 dollars are VERY common. Expect to bankroll a ton of parking meters whether you live downtown or not or pay a lot in parking garages if you plan on using your car to get around the city.
Entertainment costs are also higher than most other places I've lived. A standard movie ticket here is like $11 or so up to $17 with IMAX per ticket per showing. That should give you a rough idea of cost.
Groceries and Household Shopping. I've compared cost of stuff like shampoo and what not to cost I use to pay outside of California and noticed that for the same size bottle or smaller, I am paying possible a couple dollars more even from the same store. So cost of goods is slightly more expensive here base on a few comparisons I've done.
That should give you a ROUGH estimate on how much things cost around here and what it would be like.
Couldn't care less. Never was excited about it. Always figured it was flawed from the start. The average human being does not care about "open source" and while they like the theory of being open, they can't do anything with it (code wise) and the mass majority who aren't in tech or more specifically programming, don't have their own web host to even host the damn thing. The incentive is low and really, even if everyone hates Facebook, fact is, they're too lazy to do anything about it.