LivingSocial, a daily deal service that’s been booming in popularity lately, has acquired SocialMedia, a social advertising network for $3 million. While the acquisition is not as big in itself, what’s important to note is its domain name. If you remember, SocialMedia was one of the first companies to create a Facebook ad network that used your friends’ pictures in the ads. Facebook even tried to acquire it, but was denied. The debacle called for legal action from them, for privacy policy violations.

Talking about coupon sites, we also heard Groupon announcing the acquisition of Whrrl, Pelago, the parent company of LBS services app, for an undisclosed sum.

“Pelago CEO and former Amazon executive Jeff Holden will be now be overseeing product development at Groupon and members of the Pelago team will be taking on roles in “Grouponnovations” after Whrrl shuts down on April 30th 2011.”

Additionally, Groupon is putting a lot of effort towards its consumer behavior data, and analyzing its big data to determine the effectiveness of its advertising expenditures, consumer behavior as well as purchaser demographics and location.  Groupon’s got a massive amount of hyperlocal data, and with the inclusion of Whrrl’s mobile local data and preferences, it will need to process data as quickly as possible to distribute and market to its massive user base.

This all has big implications in the cloud. Groupon getting a great deal of its own as a Cloudera user.  Groupon’s taken in Cloudera’s latest distribution for Apache Hadoop. The daily deal giant today announced that it has implemented Cloudera’s Distribution for Apache Hadoop (CDH) to get more value from the massive amounts of data and information they collect and generate.

To achieve this goal, Groupon approached the Hadoop experts at Cloudera to assist in laying the foundation for a large-scale data system, and then worked closely with the Cloudera team to capture their ever-swelling collection of data into Hadoop.

“Cloudera is committed to companies with large amounts of complex data like Groupon by providing the Hadoop-based platform industry-standard in CDH along with unsurpassed Hadoop-related support and services,” said Amr Awadallah, CTO, Cloudera. “Groupon is a perfect example of how enterprises can best make use of Hadoop to get the most insight out of their data and we’re proud to be working with such a trail-blazing company.”

This has also helped Groupon expand its infrastructure as well as team size as it has managed to grab several talented engineers to join their teams in Palo Alto and Chicago.