A new spate of numbers has come out from Facebook-tracking labs, giving number-lovers some new factoids to ogle over. Among the most fascinating trend is a spike in the number of users over fifty-five years old.

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Early adopters often view Microsoft as being a huge, slow, dinosaur of a corporation.  But then, those same early adopters may be thrilled by Microsoft’s latest move, as it’s established an official Twitter account, perhaps proving the microblogging site’s importance.  This is an official account for the main company, mind you, not its various branches, and if you’re interested in following Microsoft, you can find it here.

A search for “Barack Obama” on Twitter turns up who-knows-how-many imposters posing as the President. Most of them are easy to spot. And that’s to be expected-unfortunate though it may be. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn-all the networks have the same predicament. Twitter, thankfully, has been able to shut down most fakers, although the problem still creeps up now and then.

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If you see an influx of interesting videos on YouTube in the near future, you can thank Apple for them.  Or, of course, if they’re awful, you can blame the company.  But either way, a Music Ally article reports, “Google has announced that uploads from mobile phones to YouTube have increased by 400% since last Friday, when Apple’s new iPhone 3GS went on sale.”  And that number’s liable to rise as more people become owners and more owners read the instruction manual.

You may have heard by now that Facebook’s dabbling in real-time search - the ability to look up what your friends and other people are saying, as they say it.  And that’s rather interesting.  But a key point is the fact that a lot more information will, so long as individuals’ privacy settings allow, become public.  So in accordance with the traditions established by MySpace and Twitter, it may soon become a lot easier to see different folks’ status updates, photos, notes, and all other sorts of stuff.

Conan O’Brien has, in your humble author’s opinion, been one of the funniest men on TV for many years.  But now he’s in a more accessible timeslot, and he’s directed a nod to the tech crowd in the form of a segment called “Twitter TRACKER.”  Two sketches that involve teasing celebrity users and murdering cartoon birds have generated a lot of laughs, and video clips of them are spreading in a viral manner.  All hail CoCo (although it’s a shame he’s up against the also-great Letterman.)

With very little sarcasm intended, we begin this post with a cry of “nooooooooo!”  A News Corp executive has said that he thinks Hulu might start charging money for certain shows and movies at some point.  Jonathan Miller told Jeff Bercovici, “in my opinion the answer could be yes.  I don’t see why over time that shouldn’t happen.  I don’t think it’s on the agenda for Monday [but] it seems to me that over time that could be a logical thing.”  Let’s hope that Miller’s using “over time” in the sort of geological sense that makes one million years the blink of an eye.

Twitter may grow considerably more interesting in the near future.  Frederic Lardinois wrote yesterday, “At the 140 Twitter Conference yesterday, Alex Payne, Twitter’s API lead told Robert Scoble that Twitter might soon add location-based information to every tweet.”  Comments might be on the way, too.  So Twitter users would be more easily able to associate conversations on the site with real-world places, and at the same time, Twitter would sort of copy something from Facebook (whereas things have usually moved in the other direction).

Your humble author does not like the Dave Matthews Band.  In his opinion, roughly the only redeeming thing it’s done was that video with the Blue Man Group.  Still, Dave Matthews is pretty popular, and so here’s the news: Hulu’s first ever live, streaming concert will feature him.  Tune in on June 1st if you enjoy the music or just want to witness a major moment in Hulu’s life.

Towards the end of “Scrubs,” the janitor - who is the craziest regular character on the show - came up with his own type of money.  Now there’s word that dear old Facebook is trying to do the same thing.  Yes, a Facebook rep told Nicholas Carlson, “We’re starting a very small alpha test with a handful of developers that explores ways for users to use their Facebook credits with third-party applications on Facebook.com.  The test hasn’t started so it’s too early to get into the details.”  It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.

Celebrity endorsements can, depending on the people involved and the project’s execution, be anything from stupid to amazing.  But regardless of your politics, something that recently happened involving Flickr is pretty cool: the Official White House Photostream was unveiled.  This goes a long way towards saying that the First Family likes Yahoo’s picture-sharing site more than the competition.

Hulu just got a whole lot cooler.  Like “Lost”?  “Scrubs”?  Even “Desperate Housewives”?  Well, these shows and lots of others are now available through the site thanks to a deal between it and The Walt Disney Company.  The content should be free, as always, and there’s no reason to expect more commercial interruptions than usual.  Count on Hulu’s traffic levels to skyrocket as word of this makes its way around the Web.

Music videos have become a little more rare on YouTube recently; scuffles with groups representing musicians in both the UK and Germany have resulted in YouTube pulling all professional clips from the country-specific sites to be on the safe side.  But YouTube’s now in talks with the Germany organization GEMA, and if it can work out a deal in this case, it may be clear sailing all across the world.  People in the UK will get music videos back, and folks elsewhere won’t have to worry about losing theirs.

The Ning Platform is pretty darn popular.  Earlier today, a post on the corporate blog announced, “[W]e just passed one million social networks on the Ning Platform. . . .
We’re humbled to see the incredible variety of your one million social networks.”  And the hubbub around the creation of the millionth social network is likely to create a sort of snowball effect, of course, so it’ll be interesting to see how the Ning Platform continues to grow in the future.

Digg denizens have something to cheer about today.  The site’s search engine has, according to cofounder Daniel Burka, been improved by an almost immeasurable amount.  Look for filters, try search tricks that work elsewhere, and keep an eye on how long the whole process takes, as the search engine’s supposed to have gotten faster, too.  Burka invites, “Go kick the tires and let us know what you think either by clicking the feedback link at the bottom of any search result or in the comments for this post.”