It’s okay for you to be skeptical; according to a post on the YouTube Blog, even the video-sharing site’s own employees thought they might be victims of an April Fools’ Day prank when they heard the news.  Believe it or not, though, YouTube was given a Peabody Award, which puts it on a level with some very distinguished entities, including The New York Times, “Washington Week with Gwen Ifill,” and “Lost.”  And we should note that there haven’t been any reports of Hell freezing over as a result.

Have you ever stopped to consider whether the FBI can create really wonderful videos?  Or if everyone inside the CIA is an amazing photographer?  Well, you might get to find out, because the General Services Administration has signed deals with YouTube and Flickr (along with a few other services), and government agencies can now use the social media sites as they please.  According to Federal Computer Week, concerns about “liability limits, endorsements and freedom of information” are no more.  But in the movie category, it’s a good bet that Love Naturally will be tons better than anything the feds can put together.

YouTube users aren’t accustomed to seeing live video.  They aren’t often shown long clips, either.  This is the time of year in which many people and companies come down with March Madness, though, and it seems YouTube’s embraced the idea by showing live basketball games.  One more interesting note: it’s Microsoft’s Silverlight technology that is powering the experience.

Hulu’s wonderful.  That said, you still can’t exactly gather friends ’round the computer monitor to watch shows and movies.  But a new social networking component called Hulu Friends takes at least a small step in a community-related direction, allowing users to create profiles, invite other people to sign up, and review and share different clips.  This is sure to make watching old episodes of “The A-Team” even more fun.

Is recession and financial fear pushing folks to stay at home and entertain themselves instead of splashing out on a movie and dinner date? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s the inclement weather. Whatever the reason, online video viewing continued to rise in January.

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Believe it or not, the social network that used to serve just a few American colleges is becoming a global phenomenon.  Ben Lorica reports, “Within Asia, the fastest-growing countries over the last 12 weeks were Indonesia (up 169%) and the Philippines (up 119%).”  Also, “Among the smaller countries in Europe, Facebook grew fastest in the Czech Republic (up 144%) and Slovakia (up 137%).”  To achieve world peace, maybe the U.N. should trade in all its fancy auditoriums and boardroom tables for a social network, eh?

When you use a search engine to look someone up, it’s quite possible that you’ll want to contact them, right?  Or make friends, view their other pals, or administer a poke.  So from this point forward, Yahoo intends to make Facebook enhanced search results automatically appear and allow for all of these actions.  The move was made with Facebook’s blessing and thanks to SearchMonkey technology.

Anyone who loves Twitter’s fail whale may want to take a screenshot and say goodbye.  Believe it or not, Twitter received $35 million in funding late last week, which means the site will soon have no excuses for being anything less than completely stable.  This also means that users probably don’t have to worry about getting bombarded with ads or bugged about premium memberships, since Twitter won’t need to land on a business model in the near future.

Downloading YouTube videos has long been possible, but not easy – the process involves outside sites, wait times, and other little annoyances.  Now YouTube’s toying with the idea of actually allowing downloads.  The bad news is that the option isn’t available with every clip, and in some cases, you may find that fees are being charged.  More details and a few examples are available through the YouTube Blog.

Version 5.0 of Google Earth was recently released, and the main selling point (figuratively speaking since it’s free) was the inclusion of detailed ocean imagery.  Now it seems YouTube’s benefiting from the upgrade, as users are being encouraged to indicate with geo tags which videos were shot underwater.  People who play in a lot of oceans and lakes – or just enjoy seeing what other folks find there – should get to it.

YouTube’s easily the top video-sharing site.  Now, if it wants to move forward, it’ll have to either increase its offering of professional-looking stuff or improve at the advertising game.  A single step might let it win in both arenas, as the site’s supposedly nearing a deal with William Morris Agency.  This firm represents stars including Clint Eastwood, Russell Crowe, and Denzel Washington.  It’s possible their names will be attached to YouTube sometime soon, which is something advertisers would love.

Well, had the White House chosen to send out all sorts of info through Twitter, it would have been a rather impressive thing for the service.  Unfortunately, the White House didn’t – or at least not through the @thewhitehouse account – and so another minor embarrassment occurred.  Twitter’s CEO recently stepped in and altered the @thewhitehouse profile so that its lack of official standing was clear, perhaps simultaneously raising a question or two about safety and security.

This may not be a “best of both worlds” scenario; there are certainly better things about the Web than YouTube, and a lot of people prefer to use their TVs for activities besides gaming.  But YouTube for Television has entered a beta stage of development, and during it, owners of the PS3 and Wii are the intended audience.  It’s an interesting step forward that could lead to a great deal of interest on the part of advertisers.

Here’s the good news: everybody’s favorite microblogging service is about to get a little bit safer.  The bad news, though, is that it took some attacks to incentivize its leaders.  Ordinary users were attacked by a phishing scam this weekend, while some celebrities’ accounts uttered strange tweets due to a hack at a much higher level.  Now might be a good time to go change your Twitter password and make sure your account hasn’t done anything unauthorized lately.

It’s been a while since Skype made headlines, and in all honesty, it might be better for the company if this story had something to do with actual products or services.  Still, Skype has accomplished something impressive by stealing Brian O’Shaughnessy away from Google.  As reported by TechCrunch, O’Shaughnessy “oversaw communications for all of Google’s user-focused products, including YouTube, Search (Google Chrome), Apps (OpenSocial), Geo (Google Earth), and Mobile (Android).”  He’ll now fill a similar role at Skype.