Glass-half-full and glass-half-empty types, prepare to be split.  New stats from Nielsen indicate that February of 2010 was a great month for the online video industry compared to February of 2009.  Last month was a little bit rotten compared to January of 2010, however.

The chart below shows how the big-picture data categories played out.  "Unique Viewers" and "Total Streams" made the most progress year-over-year, even as "Total Streams" and "Streams per Viewer" slipped the most month-over-month.  You'll see the YOY gains are generally bigger than the MOM losses, at least.

As for how some specific brands performed between January and February, YouTube lost ground in terms of unique viewers, video streams, and time spent per viewer (-3.4 percent, -10.7, and -3.6 percent, respectively).  Hulu only slid in terms of unique viewers (-7.4 percent), while making small increases elsewhere.

At the same time, Facebook pulled in some more unique viewers (4.7 percent), and is actually coming somewhat close to matching Yahoo in this category.  Also, the CNN Digital Network and Microsoft's sites racked up big gains on the unique viewers and video streams fronts (20+ percent in both cases).

Finally, on a somewhat related note, WebProNews will be generating some video of our own as we're in Austin to cover SXSW.  Look for live video in addition to our traditional recorded coverage.

Austin, Texas - which already plays home to tech companies Freescale Semiconductor and Dell - will soon boast a Facebook office, too.  A $1.4 million incentive package we reported on in late February has been approved, and Facebook's decided to establish a team in Austin as a result.

Grady Burnett, Director of Global Online Sales and Operations at Facebook, said in a statement, "We are delighted to formally announce that Facebook will open an online sales and operations office in Austin.  The area's world-class educational system and talented workforce give us the means to quickly establish a strong outfit."

"Strong" works out to at least 200 employees, by the way, making the new office a rather significant investment.  It'll represent a fair amount of growth, too, since Facebook's actually supposed to hire 200 Texans instead of just relocate a lot of current employees.

Burnett acknowledged, "We look forward to building our team here in Austin and enjoying all the wonderful things the city has to offer."

Finally, in other Austin-related news, don't forget that SXSW has begun.  WebProNews is on hand to bring you live video coverage along with the usual articles and recorded interviews.  This promises to be a fun (and informative) conference.

Despite weeks of talks that have supposedly taken place behind closed doors, the Chinese government still seems unwilling to compromise with respect to Google and censorship.  Indeed, it may be growing hostile, as a minister talked about "consequences" today.

The BBC reported that Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong adopted a tough stance during a legislation session.  "I hope that Google will abide and respect the Chinese government's laws and regulations," he said.  "But, if you betray Chinese laws and regulations . . . it means that you are unfriendly, irresponsible, and you will have to pay the consequences."

As for what those consequences might be, it almost sounds as if China's ready to force Google out of the country whether it wants to leave or not.  The Chinese official stated at one point, "[W]hat needs to be shut down will be shut down, what needs to be blocked will be blocked."

This is less than good news for anyone who was hoping Google would be able to keep operating in China.  Considering that Eric Schmidt recently said "something will happen soon," it may even represent the end of the road, rather than just another outburst of rhetoric.

Or not.  Investors on both sides have failed to flinch, with Google's and Baidu's stocks up about equal amounts so far today.

Google Wave didn't do so well when it came out of the gate, and Buzz's privacy problems stole all of the attention not too long after.  But now that Google's addressed most of Buzz's faults, it's trying to move forward again by rolling out an extensions gallery for Google Wave.

Interestingly, this initial version is still a little rough around the edges in terms of functionality.  Also, there are just 18 extensions listed at the moment, and Google's suggested design tweaks are on the way.  We'll let you decide whether the company's gotten ahead of itself or made a smart move by involving developers and users as soon as possible.

As for what's available, the extensions represent an interesting mix of useful and fun/frivolous stuff.  One's called Wave Sudoku, while others function as poll gadgets, phone and video chat aids, and a weather forecast provider.

Anyway, Dan Peterson, Google Wave's Product Manager, explained on the Google Wave Developer Blog, "The gallery is simply a set of waves containing extension installers (the puzzle pieces).  The first wave, 'Read me first' contains an introduction to extensions and how to use them.  In many cases, those particular waves won't maintain their read/unread status in Google Wave preview; we're working on this."

It should be interesting to see how long Google takes to make its tweaks, and how quickly the extensions gallery is populated.

If Yahoo has its way, it'll soon be the place to go for information about movies, TV shows, and the celebrities who star in them.  Yahoo announced several upgrades to its search engine this morning, and they're all meant to make entertainment-related queries turn up much better results.

A Yahoo representative told WebProNews, "Today Yahoo! Search is unveiling new ways for people to explore information on their favorite celebs and TV shows by providing the most comprehensive and up to the moment entertainment news and content.  With Yahoo! Search's celebrity shortcuts, people can see news, photos, movies and even the celebrity's official tweets right on the search results page."

What's more, "Yahoo! is also introducing a TV shortcut so people can search for their favorite TV shows and see videos, episode lists, schedules and ratings from Yahoo! TV."  And "we are launching new celebrity-related suggestions on the left-side of the Yahoo! Search results page for entertainment queries, with links to results for related people, movies, etc."

You can see an example of how this all comes together below.  The results page packs in a whole lot of information, but still manages to not look overly cluttered or messy. 

Yahoo appears to have leapfrogged well ahead of Google and Bing with these upgrades.

Last week, we reported that Facebook wanted to hire two people in Washington, D.C., and then dissected the official descriptions of the positions as best we could.  Still, the bullet points left a lot unclear, so it's noteworthy that Facebook provided some clarifying paragraphs today.

Adam Conner was the first member of Facebook's D.C. team, and a post he wrote for the company's internal blog was actually promoted to its public blog this afternoon.  Conner - who also deserves applause for being a Conan supporter - did a good job of explaining some of his responsibilities and favorite moments.

Here's one excerpt that reveals just how politically connected Facebook may be: Conner wrote, "The week of January 11-17 was pretty cool, helping to pull together the Global Disaster Relief Page in just few hours.  I went on vacation that weekend and was on the phone in Mexico convincing President Clinton to plug our Facebook page as part of the relief efforts."

As for the more day-to-day stuff, Conner described his duties by writing, "I get to sit in meetings with vaguely important and occasionally actually important people and explain why Facebook is like the wheel or fire and how not using it really isn't an option anymore."

It sounds like the social network's well on its way to being omnipresent in Washington, then, especially as it adds two more employees.

YouTube Partners are, pretty much by definition, some of YouTube's most important users.  They create original content, don't violate copyright laws, and have huge audiences.  It makes sense, then, that YouTube is now looking hard for ways to improve its Partner Program.

The hunt has taken the form of a crowdsourced project.  Just as the Ideas Page for YouTube was created not too long ago for the sake of the whole site, the new Product Ideas Page for the YouTube Partner Program covers this single subject.  People can submit ideas and vote on which ones they think are best.

It's an effective process.  On the YouTube Biz Blog, Filipe Lima noted with respect to the first effort, "It was a success, receiving almost 3,000 ideas and more than 300,000 votes.  We even launched a few features that directly addressed some of the requests - namely, an HTML5 Beta (there were many HTML5 advocates who participated) and a sneak peek of our new cleaner video page (some desired a 'less cluttered' YouTube)."

So now we'll see where round two takes us.

The deadline for both new submissions and votes is April 12th.  If you have any suggestions, get them in earlier, though, for the sake of giving them more time to become popular.