All Things Digital

Now in her second week at Facebook, new COO Sheryl Sandberg (pictured here) probably thought BoomTown was done making suggestions of things she needed to work on at the social networking site.

Not even close! (Although we promise eventually to do a post on things BoomTown likes about Facebook.)

But that day is not today, where the focus is on search. It is a topic you should know a lot about, given those half-dozen years you spent at the Googleplex as one of its top execs.

And while your job focus was on ad operations, one cannot imagine you did not pick up a thing or two about search, which is like oxygen there.

And, I am sorry to say, if this was the case at Facebook, we would all be turning a magnificent shade of blue right about now from lack thereof.

That’s because search on Facebook, which is billed as a place to find friends, is about as bad as it can be. In fact, it has so few features and so little usability that I would be better off tagging some of my friends with those dog-collar homing devices to keep track of them.

Case in point is my email (which I have already whined about here). Last night, I was searching for a particular email from the fall and had to slog through page after page of unorganizable emails to find it purely from memory.

And your new feature to make lists of friends is very time-intensive, even though it is described as: “Now you can easily organize your friends into convenient lists for messaging, invites, and more.”

But it is a lot harder than it seems, with only snapshots and names to use as you are selecting how to organize them.

Currently, for example, I have 661 friends I made before being able to even make lists, with 217 more requests I am ignoring, since the prospect of a massive list I cannot manage is exhausting, even though I know there are people in there I want to interact with and know about without opening up each and every profile.

While it is nice to now be able to add friends to a list, it is still much too crude a way to understand this important social graph.

So instead of being this enlightened ecosystem, my friends list feels like a really good library with all the books scattered on the floor in a messy pile.

That makes things hard, since some friends are real friends and some are people I kind of know and others people who like BoomTown, for example.

It would be nice then to just have a way to drag and drop these names or present me with some more sophisticated way search and sort them.

The same search problems are present all over Facebook, where almost nothing is searchable in an easy way.

I did a universal search, for example, of Barry Manilow–your god of music and mine (Vegas, baby!)–and got 424 mostly meaningless results (as you can see below; click on the image to make it bigger).

And don’t even get me started on trying to search for good widgets–but let’s just say it makes the quest for the Holy Grail look simple.

Thus, I have a very good suggestion with what, what, what you can do with yet another slug of money–$60 million more–that Facebook got recently from Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing.

No, not a set of those pricey Japanese massage chairs or automated toilets seats that blanket the Google (GOOG) campus from whence you came. No, not MacBook Airs for all at the startup. No, not even a lifetime supply of Red Bull for the gang-that-likes-to-work-all-night in Palo Alto.

Right now, you have $120 million from Li, to go with the $240 million Microsoft handed over, and I am guessing Facebook breaks even on operations, so you might still have some errants tens of millions left over from earlier investments.

This is a lot of scratch to work with to create a world-class search to make Facebook what your CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg calls a “utility.”

And utility means useful, so get busy on creating a search product worthy of the well-organized profile pages that Facebook is known for.

That, or fork over some dough for Google or Yahoo (YHOO) or Microsoft (MSFT) to do it for you.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

On your fourth day at Facebook, my data said to me: Sheryl will surely set us free.

But, let’s be realistic–getting ubiquitous data portability is about as likely as actually finding a partridge in a pear tree.

Still, here’s an issue the new COO can actually sink her teeth into, as the notion of who has the rights to your data on social-networking sites like Facebook and how much control you have over it yourself is a topic that will surely eventually become a political one (and politics was an arena in which Sandberg was involved as a staffer in the Clinton administration).

While I know Facebook this week joined in a Microsoft (MSFT) initiative–along with social-networking sites like LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo–on a new and, well, convoluted, scheme to allow users to move their relationship info between the services, I am sorry to say that it is just not enough. Not nearly enough.

Like the appalling situation in instant messaging, where the key services do not work together because companies put their interests ahead of consumers’ convenience, there should be an industry-wide standard to allow users to move a great deal, if not all, of their data among and between services of their choice.

Obviously, all photos and videos, as well as personal information inputted, should be easy to move. And I do realize there needs to be clear privacy parameters around moving data about your friends (who, in any case, gave you access to the data in the first place).

And I do realize this is a difficult technological issue, but you are all very smart, I am told, and have plenty of money to figure it out.

So why won’t it happen quickly?

In a post I wrote in January after blogger Robert Scoble got slapped by the company for using software to “scrape” his data from his Facebook profile, I noted an even more obvious reason.

I wrote: “More to the point, such an ability would be damaging to Facebook’s business plan around building a robust ad business. The success of that squarely relies on people staying and actively using the service because they have committed time and effort in putting up scads of information, photos and videos about themselves on the service, as well as establishing a complex and personally valuable network of friends.”

While sites like Facebook like to trot out privacy concerns about this particular issue of being able to digitally move friends’ data around without explicit permission (even though a person could physically copy all this data and move it anyway), to my mind, the issue has more to do with social-networking sites wanting to lock you into their services, rather than allowing you to do what you like.

It’s all very parental, but not very realistic.

In fact, I might have several services I use, like Facebook for fun and LinkedIn for work and MySpace to meet, say, fellow fans of Barry Manilow (yes, I am a Fanilow).

Thus, I would like to be able to move data around easily and without having to pick a certain camp to live in to do so.

After all, as the great Barry sings (sort of): Oh, Facebook, well, I came and I gave (my data) without taking.

Now, though, I want to take.