Social media has been big business for some time, but given the growth of this industry, a burning need to monetize throughout its evolution, and its expansion in the cloud, its potential for curated cohesiveness is playing out in the space’s development and investment.  Given the big data theme of the O’Reilly Strata Conference we attended this week, we thought it fitting to look at social media’s recent developments from the data perspective.  One trend to especially pay attention to is the turning down of the fire hose, which can overwhelm a user on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or even Gmail.

First up we have Gnip, which launched a nw ool called Power Track, giving businesses access to tweets that matches 100% of their filtering criteria. This management tool for the personal cloud created by Gnip is a keeper for the company, due to increased importance of data management, even on an enterprise level. Facebook, too, informed on its future implementation of its  comments system, a tool designed to identify users that make inappropriate comments under fake identities. Yet, critics view Facebook’s plan as invading privacy, considering the matter of algorithmic weeding and the potential around hindering a real user’s freedom of speech (how many legit users were kicked of Facebook for a photo of a nursing baby?).

Social sharing around web content is an accelerating trend, and not one that automated algorithms and privacy settings can fully contain.  Tapping into social media users to curate, recommend and all together organize the web is a revamped ideal, thanks to new systems and mobile participation. This sector of the social media universe is drawing million of dollars at the moment, and the figures are expected to rise. To name just an example, Instagram received a $7 million funding round. The founders of the company admit not having even come up with a business plan to create and develop what is about to become the most popular photo-archive service that gathered over 1.75 million members in four months.

Even the promotion of the service itself was carried out with social media tools, namely Twitter, with investor Jack Dorsey announcing the release of the first Instagram application to its 1 million followers. The personal cloud is seen as a promising aspect of social media’s future, attracting at the moment huge sums, such as Path, raising $8.65 million in the past few weeks.