The world wide web is turning into a real mess.

I recently started using Facebook as a way of reaching more podcasters and members of our communities over at RawVoice. I also have a personal Facebook account. I have a pair of MySpace accounts. One is personal and one is for business. I have a Flickr Pro account which used to be a Flickr account but is now attached to a Yahoo! account. I’ve also got several accounts on Google. In addition I run a personal family website and several blogs.

There is so much information that we want to get on or push across the web. We do this for a variety of reasons. We have several categories of people that we are communicating with. The last few years have been exciting in that RSS and rich media have made the web a much more vibrant place. New communities have been created that speak to the needs of the average web user. Services like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are great examples of that.

Unfortunately all these free and low cost services come at a price. Your friends have to sign up for extra accounts that they may not need. Advertising is served in a very random manner. Some content that you want to keep private may end up being public. There is little flexibility on the categorization of relationships. Some services focus on a single discipline (like showing videos) and you are forced to adopt multiple services (and accounts) to meet your communication needs.

I want to use the web to communicate in an efficient manner. The current state of things does not lend itself to efficiency.

I want to be able to identify a person based on information they already have. So they shouldn’t have to sign up for a new account. I want to have flexible options in categorizing that person. Everyone can’t be just a friend. I want to control the experience that people who visit my site are going to have. That means if there are ads I will decide what they will be. I want to be able to communicate in variety of media formats including text, audio, video and photos. Finally, I want to be able to do this at a single location on the web.

The vast majority of this is possible right now. I can use a system like Drupal to configure my own site that does all of these things from a single presence. It will take a bit of time and a lot of effort. I’m actually working on something like this for my family right now. What about everyone else though?

After a bit of consideration I think that Ning has come the closest to creating something that supports this idealistic view of web community building. You can do a lot (but not all) of the things I mentioned above there. You can pay a fee that allows you to remove advertising and place your community on a custom domain. People still have to sign up for a Ning account though. Still, its probably one of the better options for those who are not technically inclined and at the same time care about the experience for their visitors.

Now I realize that certain services are better at certain tasks. WordPress.com is a great personal publishing service. But WordPress can’t touch Flickr as a photo publishing and management tool. That’s just one example.

I think there’s a way that all these services can do what they do best and still serve people who want to create communities. It involves the cooperation of open source platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. First you need need paid hosting for all of these platforms. WordPress.com and Bryght (for Drupal) already offer hosting for a couple of these platforms. The hosting should be paid because we want these services to be around forever. And as such they will require financial resources.

All the major media publishing and community building services should consider creating APIs that allow the open source platforms to interact with their servers. These APIs would allow each person’s community to interact with their system in order to bring the service’s features to that person’s community. There is plenty of precedence here. The Akismet anti-spam platform is doing it. Google Maps is doing it. Others are doing it as well.

Some services might object to this anonymous access that bypasses their standard identity and advertising delivery systems. That’s fine. Put a price on access to your technology. Let the user sign up from their web management dashboard. Either charge the user directly or charge the host of the platform for that user.

The point here is to allow non-technical users access to today’s (and tomorrow’s) communications tools for the web. To create a best of breed solution that meets their needs and respects their desires to work efficiently and create an excellent experience for members of their communities.