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Hires of software developers and web designers slowed last week, while tech and new media company hires for Director level positions increased substantially over the six weeks prior. Developers and designers still remained among the season's most in-demand people in tech while marketing and IT firms saw big increases in hires. A whole lot of surprising hires we've been seeing in the publishing world (new and old) finally slowed down this week.

We've tracked these and other interesting stats and stories about people still getting jobs at a time of economic downturn. Check out our chart-laden full coverage of this season's new hires in tech and new media over at our hiring news site Jobwire.

If there's any doubt that Facebook is rapidly becoming the next big thing in social networks, you only need look at their recent statistics. According to new reports, in recent weeks Facebook is growing at a rate of 600,000 users each day, up from 300,000 to 400,000 users per day earlier this quarter. The company is also reporting that, as of today, they have reached 140 million active users.

If you're a Google Reader user, no doubt you've taken a look at your Google Reader trends. The trends feature of Reader is an invaluable service that shows you which feeds you read, share, star, and email. It also provides stats on your subscriptions themselves, showing which ones are frequently updated, inactive, or the most obscure. Bar charts show items read by day, time of day, and time of week, and a tag cloud lets you find items by keyword. With all this data within easy reach, Google Reader Trends provides insight into your feed reading habits which you can then use help you to improve your feeding reading activities as well as the way you categorize your feeds and more.

But Google Reader isn't the only web app that could use a feature like this. If we could pick any other Google service to provide an analysis of our habits, it would certainly be Gmail. But could it be that Trends for Gmail is already underway?

Everyone is talking about Twitter (to the consternation of many of our readers, I'm sure), but what are people talking about on Twitter? It is really just a flood of inane status updates and fragmented chat, or are people actually talking about things that matter to them via the service? We've talked about Twitter as a platform for serious discussion, but is anyone really using it that way? We teamed up with Summize to take a closer look about what people are talking about in the Twitosphere.

CenterNetworks reported yesterday on the launch of the new TotalWeb tracking service from Nielsen, which includes mobile traffic along with desktop PC traffic in its measurement of top Internet properties. When including mobile traffic, says Nielsen, top Internet sites can extend their reach an average of 13%. Though TotalWeb only covers about "200 leading Internet sites" (ironic for a product called TotalWeb), the data is nonetheless interesting.

Google announced this evening the immediate availability of a new video statistics package free for anyone with a YouTube account. The software, called Insight, gives users access to a range of statistics about the videos they upload to the site, such as where viewers are from, how often viewers in specific geographic regions viewed a video, or how long it took a video to become popular.