It’s a strange week for acquisitions involving personal data and the lives of users this week as both Facebook and Apple have generated stories about what acquisitions they’re making. On the Apple site, we’re watching from a precipice overlooking a cloud-filled vale as the company appears to be preparing to leap into streaming music and video; and on the Facebook side, there seems to be inklings that they may be reaching deeper into data visualization for their users.

Apple and the Long Leap Into the iCloud

Multiple sources are reporting today that Apple has bought the domain name iCloud.com from Sweedish cloud services provider Xcverion for $4.5 million. According to ReadWriteWeb, this could be the big news we’ve been waiting for,

The speculation so far has been that the data center will be for iTunes storage and streaming. Think “iTunes Everywhere.” It is also likely that Apple will rebrand its existing cloud product MobileMe at some point, perhaps with the iCloud designation. Either way, with a $4.5 million price tag for the domain name, it is likely that iCloud will be a significant chip in Apple’s portfolio.

Om Malik of GigaOm first reported the possible iCloud.com purchase. Currently iCloud.com is redirecting to CloudMe.com. CloudMe is what Ecerion rebranded its cloud service from iCloud earlier this month. According to Malik, Ecerion acquired CloudMe.com on April 5, 2011.

The progression towards the inevitable outcome began to come to light in October 2010 when Apple finally inked a deal with a North Carolina couple for their land to the tune of $1.7 million. As expected the land would probably go to a large data center, which when April of this year rolled around, Apple purchased 12 petabytes of storage from EMC division Isilon Systems. These factors put together and the fact that the computer distributor becoming media giant would now be directly be competing with Amazon—who already have their own cloud-based music streaming service with Cloud Drive.

Finally, if all that wasn’t good enough when put together, Apple plucked Microsoft’s Kevin Timmons, a cloud expert who helped the software behemoth build an energy and data efficient data center infrastructure.

Land for data center, construction of data center, purchase of a giant boatload of data, plus cloud expert equals: A high probability that iTunes is heading the streaming route and the cloud will be their magic carpet to get their customers there.

Facebook and Daytum Could Give Your Data that Personal Touch

An announcement on Daytum’s blog caught the eye of AllThingsD when they mentioned that they’d been acquired by the social network Facebook. Well known for their detailed, in-depth visualizations of personal data.

Daytum co-founder Nicholas Feltron famously creates beautiful infographics about his annual personal behavior; Daytum was a mobile app to help other people track and organize the everyday data of their lives.

Daytum is at least the third New York-based company Facebook has acquired, and its founders will be moving west to join the Facebook product design team at its headquarters.

The blog announcement at Daytum suggests that they’ve been acquired to assist with product development. As we all know, Facebook has a giant, active population—and may as well be the biggest (virtual) city in the entire world—and that’s a lot of data to collect and collate. People may not like having all of this information collected about them, but it’s a goldmine for social anthropologists as well as commercial interests for marketing and understanding their audiences.

Daytum has proven in the past that they’re really good at finding the underlying connections within personal data and visualizing it in ways that people can enjoy. Hooking up with Facebook may mean the deployment of apps that give people that personal touch to their own data (which, of course, Facebook will have greater access to.)

I expect this will probably lead to a lot more pretty web and smartphone apps for people to access Facebook, visualize their data, and it will also spawn an entire new wave of questions about privacy. Especially because as social animals people are all too willing to give away lots of personal information for pretty trinkets and social standing.

No doubt, the outcome will be dazzling. So expect Daytum to bring a lot of new facts and figures into our lives through Facebook; but we’ll be here to report on the culture jamming and other artifacts that emerge.