One of the questions that I get asked the most is “what is the next big thing on the Web?”. Usually, when people ask this, they’re trying to find out which company will be hot next, or which app will get our attention for six to twelve months. That’s a short view and not an answer to what the “next Web” looks like, meaning how we’ll use the Internet in three to five years.

Things will change; our interfaces to the Internet will start to alter, our communication styles will continue to evolve. I think I have a pretty good idea of what the next web will look like. It won’t be more services or social networks, it will be more control over the wild west of an Internet that we have today.

Control of data is a big part of the next web. Our data, specifically. We’ve given up a ton of it, and now it’s time to get something in return.

Successful companies know this, and that’s why they’ve been collecting heaps of data over the past ten years. Let’s look at the companies who have the most data, and how they’ll use it to usher us into a more personalized web, where we’re in the driver’s seat.

Facebook will be an operating system

Facebook has our relationship data and has a pretty good idea of who we are. By analyzing what we like, comment on, and by who we interact with, Facebook could nearly clone some of us with the amount of information and tendencies they’ve learned from us since launching to the free world.

On September 26, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg and company started what would be one of the longest term visions of any company known to man. On that date, the company became available to anyone with an email address. Over years and years, they would collect information about us. And we’d give it to them willingly. Make no mistake about it, Facebook owns at least a part of your digital identity, along with over 800 million other people’s.

Having said that, you’d think that the next Web involves Facebook advertising to us based on the information we’ve given them. That’s a short-term goal for Facebook. The long-term vision could be an operating system in the cloud that starts with you and ends with you. The feature that will begin giving your data back to you in a presentable way is Timeline, which is yet to be released to the world.

When you install a fresh version of an operating system, there’s nothing there. You have to install software, tinker with settings, and get your environment to your liking. A Facebook operating system doesn’t need any tinkering whatsoever. Facebook knows what you like, what you do, when you do it, and how you do it. The service stores your social brain.

What if a random stranger let you log into their Facebook account? You could get a pretty good idea of who they are pretty quickly based on the friends they have, and the things they’ve interacted with.

One of Facebook’s investors is Microsoft, and its consumer operating system, Windows, should be retired for a more social and web-based experience. Facebook.

To prove my point, ask yourself this. If Facebook had an integrated Web browser, would you really ever have to leave the site? A lot of people would say No.

Twitter will replace texting and take a bite out of email

Twitter, the land of goofy trending topics and celebrities, has solidified one thing – brevity. Communicating in 140 characters or less is a trend that will continue, and simply the action of keeping our thoughts brief is something that warrants the $1.16B that Twitter has raised to date.

How many companies and services you can think of have changed the way you communicate? Email, the cell phone, texting, Twitter, and yeah…that’s about it.

Apple integrated Twitter into iOS for a reason, it sees the company as a communication medium that will be around for years.

Since Twitter could take a bite out of email, the service has to eventually give us more control over our data. Personal dashboards that aggregate the contents of our thoughts and tell us things about ourselves that we might not have cognitively known is a perfect example of how Twitter is a part of the next Web. Data in, insights out.

Google will think for us

Google arguably has some of the most valuable data, that being a record of all of the things we search on. Search is one of the most important data points in learning our tendencies. Our aggregated search data can tell us what we’re curious about, what we’re interested in, and what we need to learn more about.

If we took the top thousand Google searches and removed all references to porn, you could probably put together a pretty strong school curriculum. Our data today could help teach people in the future.

Managing your own data

There’s a pretty good chance that we’ll be getting more out of the data that we put in over the next few years, simply because it’s inevitable. It’s like a relationship, the more you give, the more you expect in return. Nobody likes to be the giver in a relationship that has little or no return. Google’s gift to us right now is free services. Eventually, that simply won’t be enough.

As the government puts more pressure on companies that hold your data hostage, the more data we’ll get back, simply because the services will want to stay out of sticky legal situations.

The next web will also involve a suite of tools that let any person comb through their own data to find out trends about themselves, their friends, and anything else they want to learn from the data they’ve shared and interacted with. Unfortunately, as of today, that’s not something John Q. Internet can do.

I’ve been playing around with a service called ThinkUp lately. It pulls in my Google+, Facebook, and Twitter data. Hosting it all myself on Amazon servers, it gives me bits and pieces of information based on the things I’ve shared and said online. It’s astonishing. Not because the data points are impressive or overly insightful, but because it told me more than the actual services do themselves.

Not only did I learn a thing or two about how I use the Web, but I learned a lot about my friends and followers on those services. Based on what ThinkUp tells me, the most interesting stuff I’ve shared on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are the things I would have least expected.

For example, I left a comment that took three seconds of thought, and two seconds to post, and it got the most reaction of anything I did on Facebook all day. Who’d of thunk it?

Here’s a video demonstration of the service:

Data has been a powerful thing for years, driving businesses to huge success and revenue. Insights gathered from data help you predict things and alter current paths. Personal data could do amazing things for our self-awareness, self-education, and help us with our overall self-worth. It could stop us from over-sharing or push us towards a career we would have never planned for ourselves.

While we’re a long way from being able to rewind and review moments that happened in our life, we’re getting closer to it with all of the bits and bytes we leave in our wake on the Internet.

Imagine a day when you turn on your computer or your mobile device, and you’re presented with things to purchase, search for, learn more about, and think about for the day. And more importantly, insight as to why you were shown those things. It’s all right there already, we’ve put the time and effort into giving our data to services, the next Web will let us actually make something of it.

In a study published by BGR today, it has been made clear that the slew of messaging and VOIP apps on the market are already making a dent into the paid services provided by carriers.

The study by mobile(SQUARED) shows that according to operators, messaging, voice and video apps will cause usage of its own services to drop between 11% and 20% over the next 5-10 years. Some operators see that number being closer to 31%-40%.

Even Steve Jobs wanted to build his own wireless carrier to bypass services provided by carriers. For example, iMessages completely bypasses text messaging. Will we just need data from carriers in the near future? Probably.

Since companies like Facebook are ramping up its free Messages platform, and Google Voice getting more and more integrated into our social experiences, carriers may have to look closely at its offerings to keep its customers happy, and more importantly paying.

The study was carried out for Mavenir, and its VP Shubh Agarwal had this to say about the findings:

The findings confirm what we have found in discussions with the mobile industry. This is one of the primary reasons the industry is currently moving towards an all-IP converged core network accelerated by the deployment of LTE technology. By allowing users to place high-definition voice and video calls, chat, share content, and discover new services as part of a globally connected framework, operators can retain and even grow their share of customer communication spend.

mobile(SQUARED) analytics Gavin Patterson shared his thoughts about the upcoming decline in need for carrier’s service:

The mobile landscape is changing as users embrace messaging of all kinds that enable them to seamlessly message a multitude of devices. This study confirms that lucrative messaging revenues are already impacted and operators are assessing ways to deliver core-network services in the all-IP environment. Rich Communication Ecosystem (RCE) applications are one example of how mobile operators can overcome the hurdles they face.

With apps like Skype, GroupMe, WhatsApp, and Kik replacing the need for voice calling and texting on the carrier’s dime, the operators are looking to dig in and build its own group messaging and VOIP services to embed into devices tied to your existing phone number.

Just recently, WhatsApp announced that its users now send over one billion messages a day. That’s got to hurt carriers, not just because they’re missing out on potential business, but because they simply can’t control it.

Some people believe that phone numbers are a thing of the past. Yesterday, I spoke with Enflick‘s Co-Founder Derek Ting, creator of popular messaging apps TextNow and PingChat. He thinks numbers are dead in the water:

Everyone has a smart phone, 5-10 years from now, we’re going to a numberless world.

Do you text and call more than using services like Skype, Facebook, GroupMe, and Kik? Tell us in the comments.

If you still don’t have a smart phone and use text messages to interact with Twitter, you’ll be happy to hear that the service now lets you turn on SMS notifications for retweets, favorites, and follows.

Up until now, you could only get text notifications when people replied to you or simply mentioned you on Twitter. Apparently that wasn’t enough for SMS lovers.

Twitter explains how to set up and manage your SMS notifications for your cell phone here.

If you’re on an old-school flip-phone, you can now get a text message every time someone interacts with you on Twitter, so be sure that you have an unlimited texting plan.

Your mobile notification settings can be managed here.

According to a blog post from Messaging app WhatsApp, the company is now getting over one billion messages sent using its platform a day.

The company had this to say:

Just how much is 1 billion messages? that is 41,666,667 messages an hour, 694,444 messages a minute, and 11,574 messages a second.

1 billion messages a day is a significant milestone and also a small step closer towards our goal: providing a great mobile messaging system for a global market, regardless of your handset.

WhatsApp has been able to distance itself from other messaging apps by being available on iOS, Android, Blackberry and Nokia platforms. The company recently announced its first Windows Phone app as well.

Many group messaging apps have decided to change direction since Apple announced its iMessages offering, but WhatsApp is in the best position to be competitive simply because iMessage is only available on iOS. WhatsApp is currently the #8 paid app on the Apple app store.

Many have been calling for the death of text messaging, as SMS packages have been a huge money maker for carriers. WhatsApp thinks messaging should be free, and companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google are right there with them.

While listening to some of the companies presenting at ImagineK12 last week, I had a few questions about privacy. I was wondering how teachers and parents were feeling about information about students being stored on the cloud. Some of those answers will come during my interviews with each company in the coming weeks.

One service not at ImagineK12, ClassParrot, takes communications and privacy seriously. Its web app will let teachers set up a group to text to and a dashboard to track activity with their class.

It’s a very smart application of SMS features and social communication. Students are texting more and more, and what better way to interact with kids than by using the tools they’re more accustomed to.

The company says that since it launched two weeks ago, its seen over 1,200 teachers sign up for its services. For the education market, that’s a sizable number, and shows that teachers everywhere are looking for cutting edge ways to reach and speak to their students. Teachers are always looking for ways to be “cool” and ClassParrot could be a tool to facilitate that.

Setting up a class

ClassParrot lets you create as many classes as you want, and once you give your class a name, you’re given a unique 10 digit US number to give to your students. They can text the number with a code that ClassParrot gives you.

It’s as simple as that, really. And completely secure since the teacher isn’t giving out their cell number, and neither are the students.

Interacting with your class

The web app lets you send a message to students, and even has a polling system where students can reply with a simple reply via SMS to have their response counted. This could be great for real-time classroom polling on a variety of topics.

The other nice feature of ClassParrot is that you can schedule texts to go out at any given time. For example, if an assignment is due on a Wednesday, you could set up a text to go out Tuesday night as a reminder.

Group texting apps like GroupMe were all the rage last year, allowing you to text within small groups as if they were a virtual chatroom. That didn’t necessarily stick or become a major business avenue, especially since Apple introduced iMessages with built-in group chatting. However, things like privacy are very important to teachers and schools, so creating a service specifically for the education niche is often overlooked. It’s good to see that ClassParrot went ahead and did it.

When you sign up for ClassParrot, you are given 500 credits. Each credit is worth one text message out or in, but you can upgrade to an unlimited plan for $9 a month, or $90 a year. Depending on the size of the class you have, or your amount of usage, you should be able to give the app a good try-out with the free 500 credits. Students and teachers don’t need to download an app or have any specific type of phone, as ClassParrot works completely through SMS and its web interface.

Innovation is coming from all angles in the application world, and an area ripe for that innovation is calendars and scheduling. We have to-do apps, and Apple’s core calendar and reminder apps, but nothing really ties communications into reminder apps. Other players in the space are natural language calendaring apps like Fantastical.

TouchBase, created by app developer tomo wants to let you enter in all of the information about your meetings and not worry about entering in contact information or addresses. The company calls the app a “day planner”.

Making your calendar social

The goal of TouchBase is to turn meeting requests into a more social and communicative experience. For example, with TouchBase, once you arrive at a meeting, you can tap one button to let everyone know that you’ve arrived. Or you could send them an SMS saying you’re running late, again with one tap.

Since the app matches people’s names with your contacts, you can even give people a call with one touch, and without searching through your contacts. This is key, because when you’re late for a meeting, you’re usually either driving, running down the street, or waiting for a train or bus. You don’t really have time to look up a name, tap it, then tap call or message.

All calendars in one place

The other major strength of TouchBase is tying all of your calendar systems together, including Google Calendars, Apple’s own Calendar, as well as Exchange and Outlook into one place. This alone makes using TouchBase worth the 99 cents the company is charging.

The app isn’t without some issues though, as syncing speed and reliability depends on the service that you’re using. Apple’s built-in service is the most reliable since it’s local, but services like Yahoo! take a bit to sync, and can skip a cycle. If you’re not someone who has a calendar full of meetings and calls, it shouldn’t be an issue for you.

During the course of a day you’re probably asked a few hundred questions by people such as “How are you?” “What are you doing?”, or “Was today a slow news day?”. Ok, maybe not the last one. That’s where AskMeEvery steps in.

AskMeEvery is a personal polling site that will text you a question every day at a certain time, and you can respond via a regular text message. It will track your answers over time and give you a lovely graph.

All you have to do is enter your cell phone number, and you’ll receive a text with your password. Add as many questions as you like, and the time you’d like to be asked, and AskMeEvery does the rest.

Personal data is interesting, in that we enter so much information into databases without knowing all of the time. For example, every time we like something on Facebook, that is stored and tells Facebook something about us.

AskMeEvery puts the information we want to know about ourselves back into our hands. This app could be really useful as a reminder tool as well. For example, you could ask yourself everyday if you’ve walked the 3 miles you promised yourself you would. With a yes or a no, you can graph over time how often you stuck to your self made promise. That’s pretty neat.

If you’re worried about people getting into your inbox, you could do worse than follow this pretty simple tip from John Graham-Cumming.

You see, John has planted a ‘Canary’ in his inbox. What’s that? Bait for any snooping intruders which, when activated, will “Sing like a canary“, giving you information about who’s been peeking at your inbox.

Here’s how it works: John leaves a starred email showing in his Gmail account’s Priority Inbox. Purporting to be from ‘Barclays Private Banking’, it should be enough to tempt an intruder to open it. In reality, John sent this to himself from a dummy email account.

Once opened, the intruder will see a harmless email containing nothing juicy. However, an image will be displayed within the message which is hosted on Web server space controlled by John. Thus, whenever it’s accessed, the details of the visitor’s IP number and any associated available data such as location, operating system and the like, is logged and available for John to see.

Anyone can do this really easily – and if you’re concerned that your email account may be hacked, you could probably just do the above and then check the access stats for the image in your ‘Canary’ email regularly. However, with a bit of coding skill, John has set up a script on his server so that every time the image is viewed, he receives an SMS containing the IP number it was accessed from. Clever!

John wonders if there’s commercial potential in this kind of idea, and we’d say that yes – there probably is. You’d just have to get used to the annoying fake bank email stuck in your inbox forever more.

It’s designed to work just as well for local businesses as it does distributed businesses, where employees may be working from home all over the world.

Staff can check on their upcoming shifts through the web interface, via apps for their iPhone or Android device, or through more traditional methods such as email and SMS.

The app takes some of the headaches that managers experience with scheduling by factoring in requests for time off, availability changes and conflicts. There’s even a feature called ShiftReplace that, when someone drops out of their shift on short notice, allows you to notify all staff who can take over for them, allowing them to claim the shift by text message if they want it.

When I Work is surprisingly cheap for an app aimed solely at business. Price points for basic plans are $9.95 per month for 10 employees, $19.95 per month for 25 employees and $39.95 per month for 50 employees, and there are “Plus” plans for larger businesses.

The interface is clean and modern and the site is a snappy one. Each shift can be color-coded so you can see at a glance who will be working together.

When I Work is a product of thisCLICKS LLC, a Minneapolis design and development firm. When I Work is one of the first in a relatively empty space; their main competitor in the modern staff scheduling space is ShiftPlanning, with the bulk of other companies who sell staff scheduling solutions focusing on a combination of Windows desktop applications and clock-in hardware.