ReadWriteWeb

It's the end of a big week here at ReadWriteWeb. For one, we just got acquired by SAY Media. As I sit here thinking about what happened in 2011 and what's to come in 2012, I keep in mind the simple fact that soon ReadWriteWeb will be operating under a very clean look and feel in this brave new tech world. What does that have to do with 2012 predictions? Not much. Just thought I'd remind you about the state of tech news right here and now.

Which brings me to my 2012 predictions for Facebook, e-commerce, location and social networks, the four areas I've been watching closely since I joined the rad team at ReadWriteWeb this past October. Come along to the next page!

This year, Facebook unleashed frictionless sharing. As with most things Facebook, it stirred up controversy among everyone from the casual Facebook user to tech industry insiders. Here's how it works: Anytime you're reading news from a social news app or listening to music from a social music app, Facebook automatically shares it to your Facebook profile (soon to be Timeline). Frictionless sharing could be the end of manual curation and the beginning of an automatically curated social Web. Or it might just become a combination of both, with some users preferring to continue curating manually, while others mix it up. Still others will go all-auto all the time. Up until now, the user had more control over their version of the social Web. In the social networks battle, frictionless sharing could work. But it needs some adjustments first.

Nielsen has released its first mobile app rankings for Android since the organization started measuring smartphone usage directly using on-device meters.

The results are not hugely shocking, but contain some interesting tidbits nonetheless. The list is broken down into three rankings: overall usage, male usage and female usage. The top half of each list is littered with the apps you'd guess were popular: Facebook, Gmail, Maps, YouTube. Pandora, Words With Friends, Twitter and Amazon's Kindle app all make expected appearances in the top 20 as well.

Mobile application analytics company Localytics has spent time researching how users interact with their iPads and found that users spend the most time with news apps while games were the most frequented apps. Localytics measures usage sessions of apps that have it installed and the data in the study comes from monitoring when apps were opened and subsequently closed. Localytics findings show the cross-section of the app market that can be a good source for developers that want to understand how their audience is interacting with their applications.

Compared with the average user session of an iPad app, users used their news apps two-and-a-half times longer than the average app. Music apps, like Pandora or Spotify, averaged nearly two times the average usage. Sports, entertainment and games were the low items for average session length while games had the most sessions per month. Check out the charts below for more details.

Location-based media company JiWire reports seeing increases in the sharing of and the demand for local deals, like those offered by Groupon, LivingSocial and others, since last quarter. According to data from a recent survey, sharing of deals has increased by 21% and demand is up 20% from Q1 2011.

In addition, only 8% never buy local deals, up from 28% who said they never buy them just a few months ago.

Appcelerator & IDC's new mobile developer survey is out now, with details on a wide range of development trends including platform choice, developers' future plans and mobile industry challenges. Notably, the companies have now added HTML5 as a new option to rank among mobile development platforms, and its middle-of-road showing indicates that mobile websites are increasingly a complementary requirement for today's mobile developers.

Meanwhile, despite seeing a slight jump back to Q1 levels of interest, Android tablets remain a platform with a number of challenges, developers report. Explains Appcelerator, these tablets are in somewhat of a "no-man's land" in terms of developer priorities right now, as developers aren't sure what to make of the overall Android Tablet picture.

Mobile application search and discovery service Chomp has released its June 2011 report on app search trends and found that, for the second consecutive month, paid app downloads on Android have increased. The increases are small; paid Android app downloads increased just 2% from April to May and only 1% from May to June.

And in total, only 6% of all Android downloads on Chomp's network were paid.

Marketing firm Fiksu has launched two new mobile application indexes that will of interest to both app developers and marketers alike. The indexes provide insight into industry averages related to app downloads in top app stores as well as the costs associated with acquiring new users.

Today Nielsen is reporting that Google's mobile operating system Android now has the largest smartphone operating system (OS) market share here in the U.S. The top three mobile operating systems, according to this new data, are Android (39%), Apple's iOS (28%) and RIM (20%).

However, Apple is the top manufacturer of smartphones. This claim is mainly due to the fact that Apple ships its own phones, while Android is spread out across a number of OEM's, including leading manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and Samsung.

Social media analytics firm SocialNuggets has today launched a new portal for tracking real-time sentiment from consumers regarding tablet market trends. On the site, the firm will track information related to brands, products, pricing, features, applications and marketing campaigns. The goal is to provide consumers with more insight into their upcoming tablet purchases, while also providing marketers a glimpse into the social media chatter surrounding these increasingly popular devices.