Sony’s peculiarly labeled subscription multimedia service Qriocity is offering unlimited music to Android, immediately competing with the recently revealed mobile music service of Google itself. Dubbed Music Unlimited, it has two monthly subscription models at $3.99/£3.99 for basic and $9.99/£9.99 for premium. It is already being offered on Sony devices such as Blu-ray players, Playstation, PSP and Vaio PCs. The basic service plan offers Internet radio plus a scan-and-match service that scans a user’s existing collection and then allows him to listen to those song on any device without having to re-upload them (similar to what iCloud will be offering with song matching). The premium adds on-demand playback of the seven million songs in Sony’s Qriocity library, including titles not just from Sony but from all four major music labels.

The offering is intended mainly for Sony Ericsson’s Xperia product line, which runs on Android, but they also made the offering available in the Android market for any Android user.  The service was developed by Omnifone which has built the subscription music service for the company’s early smartphone models. Sony’s cloud music offering is putting pressure on Google’s service because it has already launched last year outside the US. It underscores Google’s lack of refinement both in function and record label deals.

The personal cloud trends don’t stop at music. Facebook’s next big project is an iPhone photo sharing app that functions like a mash-up of Instagram, Color, and Path. The app, which is internally labeled as Hovertown or WithPeople, will leverage with Facebook’s massive user base, and 150 million smartphone downloads. However, it will be separated from Facebook’s main iPhone app (go ahead, make a sour face). It was announced a week after Twitter heralded the development of a native photo-sharing experience in partnership with Photobucket.

The two social network announcements of an integrated photo sharing capability will greatly impact other photo sharing offerings, but apps such as Instagram, with 5 million users, will be hard to put off. Moreover, transferring your photos to another cloud service will be an arduous task, reliving issues similar to those cloud-based services of the early web, but not impossible.

The personal cloud is quickly evolving, largely due to mobile technology and media-sharing.  It’s affecting several industries, from camera manufacturers to the legal ramifications of cloud-accessible storage.  The personal cloud is spilling over into the social enterprise realm, forcing corporations, device makers and cloud services to shift their thinking around today’s culture.  With ongoing developments for the consumerization of IT, the personal cloud is getting the attention it deserves, but only time will tell how all of this pans out.