All Things Digital

Apparently, an Indian tech news site called TechGoss has its dander up about a visit Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured here) has been making to that country.

And, for information related to news of why the social-networking czar is in India, TechGoss is offering 10,000 rupees–or $240.17—specifically, 5,000 for exclusive photos of him there and 5,000 for a detailed story on his stay in India.

Currently, Facebook is the No. 3 player in India, whose social-networking scene is dominated, incredibly, by Google’s Orkut.

Asked the post: “What is Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, doing in India these days? Rumor mills are working overtime mainly pointing to a business trip to launch Facebook India soon. Others speak of a working holiday. As in the past, the Facebook PR team is only available to speak to a few chosen journalists.”

Well, Facebook PR was not helpful to me either, but that does not stop BoomTown in its greedy and ceaseless quest for rupees!

According to sources, Zuckerberg is in India and, in fact, all over the world, on a trip that is mostly for pleasure and contemplation, but also mixing it with some business.

In fact, some at Facebook are jokingly calling Zuckerberg’s month-long jaunt abroad “Vision Quest,” as the 23-year-old travels completely solo from place to place.

So in India, it is not some major initiative yet and more a getting-to-know-you visit, although Facebook will surely need to compete more handily in the growing market there.

Namasté, Mark, and safe travels!

While there have been not-so-nice insider books about Facebook, the first major deal to chronicle the rise of the social-networking phenom has been signed by Fortune magazine’s David Kirkpatrick (pictured here).

Titled “The Facebook Effect,” the tome will be (glacially) published in September of 2009 by Simon & Schuster, which noted in a statement that it “will chronicle the amazingly rapid rise of this company as well as the impact it is having on social life, politics, business and even international relations.”

Ah yes, peace in our time via The Wall!

Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have agreed to cooperate, said Kirkpatrick, who has written several pieces in Fortune on the much-hyped start-up that have been largely laudatory.

The book, said Kirkpatrick in a phone chitty-chat with BoomTown (while I froze at Little League practice in the-coldest-winter-I-ever-spent-was-a-summer-in-San Francisco) will also not necessarily be tough, but look at the ways Facebook has been the latest to profoundly impact the online industry.

“This is a company that is changing the way we use the Web, and I want to look at where it is going and what it could become,” said Kirkpatrick.

I like a positive attitude, although my book on Facebook–which I have dinged for a lot of stuff over the last year, from its kooky $15 billion valuation to its still-nascent ad business–would have been titled: “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere.”

Oops! That was actually the title of my second book on AOL, the Facebook of Web 1.0, which chronicled the near-collapse of the company after its disastrous merger with Time Warner (TWX).

That, of course, came like winter follows fall after the first I did, “aol.com,” which told the story of the stunning rise of the online pioneer.

Actually, now that I think about it, it still might work for Facebook!

I kid, David, I kid! Good luck!

This is an amazingly hip and funny video from the Sermon Series on Families at North Point Church of Springfield, Mo., posted on GodTube.

GodTube, which describes itself as a Christian video-driven social-networking site, “where users find inspiration, interact, chat, share and upload” Christian video, has about 2 million users per month.

GodTube also lets churches stream sermons and other events live on its “Godcaster” subscription service.

Also, its motto is “Broadcast Him,” but GodTube also calls itself “Jesus 2.0.” Get it?

Perhaps more in the holy-grail territory, GodTube just nabbed $30 million this week in funding from GLG Partners (GLG), which is also an investor in the less-holy Glam Media site, according to paidContent.

That gives the Dallas-based GodTube a $150 million valuation, putting it right up there with other miraculous start-up valuations like yesterday’s $500 million valuation for the online ad agency Spot Runner.

Praise the VC (and, for GodTube fans, JC too)!

Here’s the North Point Church video on GodTube:

The Googlefication of Facebook continues, as Elliot Schrage, the search giant’s vice president of global communications and public affairs, takes the title of vice president of communications and public policy at the popular social-networking site.

Schrage confirmed his new job to BoomTown, right after he friended us on Facebook last night, using its new chat feature.

Way to go native quickly, Elliot!

The move to hire Schrage (pictured here) was announced to Facebook’s employees late this evening.

In a memo that BoomTown obtained (entire text below) to Facebook troops from India, where he is traveling, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said about the Schrage hire:

“This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications.”

Valleywag said Schrage had interviewed for the job at Facebook in a post earlier today about the possibility of Schrage working there.

At Facebook, Schrage will report to Sheryl Sandberg, another top-level Google exec who was hired as COO by Facebook, which is seeking to beef up its management ranks.

Other Googlers who have recently moved to Facebook include: Ben Ling, who is Facebook’s director of platform product marketing and Ethan Beard, who is its business development director.

Schrage is a big name to defect to Facebook from Google (GOOG), a trend that is probably becoming irksome to its top execs.

But Google’s deep bench of execs are enticing to many companies, even as the burgeoning size of Google makes it harder to hold onto more entrepreneurial employees. In addition, Google can no longer offer as lucrative a stock package to its staff as start-ups can, even though most of those smaller companies are not likely to pay off.

With a $15 billion valuation, Facebook is a safer bet, but still has to prove its worth and remains a risky move for execs like Schrage.

Still, according to sources, he contacted Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg directly and did not go through Sandberg. When she left Google, as is typical for departing execs, Sandberg agreed not to solicit Google employees.

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Schrage had extensive public-policy experience before heading to Google two years ago, where he was in charge of the “company’s public-facing communications, including media relations, policy strategy and stakeholder outreach, as well as internal communications.”

He will have his work cut out for him at Facebook, which has already faced some PR snafus and vexing public policy issues, including controversy around privacy and advertising practices.

Sources said Schrage was interested in Facebook, because it was a company poised for explosive growth, much like Google in its early days. In addition, unlike Google, which has grown large, Schrage would have more of an ability to make an impact in arenas he favors like public policy.

Here is the text of Zuckerberg’s memo to Facebook employees about the hiring of Schrage (with start date and new email address missing), which was released tonight at 8:55 p.m. PDT:

Hey Everyone–

I’m writing from India to share with you the good news that Elliot Schrage will be joining our management team as VP Communications and Public Policy. In this role, he will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do. The goal here is to help people understand how the internet can strengthen people’s relationships. Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook’s policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things.

Elliot is joining us from Google where he has been their VP Global Communications and Public Affairs since 2005. At Google, he broadened the company’s messaging from a focus on only product PR to include all aspects of corporate, financial, policy, philanthropic and internal communications. Before that, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a public policy think tank, as a professor at Columbia Business School and as SVP at Gap. Early on, he began his career as a Harvard-trained lawyer.

This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications.

Elliot will be starting on __, although you may see him around the office before then. If you want to send him a note to congratulate him on joining, his email is __ and I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.

Mark

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Last year, BoomTown caused a tempest-in-a-Web-teapot by asserting that Facebook apps were, for the most part, inane.

And, while many said the market would develop from the frivolous to more useful–making Facebook a true “utility,” as promised by Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg–that day is not today for the social-networking site or its third-part widget makers.

Instead, it’s still Pinocchio at Funland (and we know how that turned out!).

While this is great news for my 3- and 6-year-old boys, it still makes grumpy old me dubious.

Because, as I wrote in a post called “The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It)” that was published last October, I still assert that businesses based on Zombies and apps called Pop Ur Zit are questionable models:

But, so far, as popular as those apps have become, what Zuckerberg and the widget-makers have wrought is mostly silly, useless and time-wasting and the kazillion users of these widgets are pretty much just acting like little children.

I never thought I would call the often frivolous AOL (TWX) back in the day–very simply, a Neanderthal version of Facebook–a mature offering in comparison…

And if that is all there is, can Facebook really build a viable and long-lasting business on what is essentially a bunch of games that will ultimately become wearying for users? Doesn’t it need more robust apps that actually are useful and relevant and make Facebook the service that Zuckerberg has often told me was a ‘utility’?

While Facebook–with a cleaner and more strict look and a better navigation–is surely less goofy than rival MySpace (NWS) for anyone over 12 years old, and its video, photo and email features are nice, the vast majority of its apps are still mostly as dumb as a box of hammers.”

Unfortunately, that’s still the case and today, we have a nice chart below from FlowingData to help our little case along from a visual point of view (click on the image to make it larger).

Case, unfortunately, not closed.

While the tech blogosphere fiddles away on navel-gazing stories–Who are the top tech bloggers? Do they Twitter to get to the top? Or do they FriendFeed? Do they feed friends while tweeting? More importantly, will there be chicken wings?–I’d advise anyone interested in the much more serious issue of making some money from Web 2.0 to take a gander at ReadWriteWeb’s piece yesterday on enterprise spending in the arena.

According to a new report from Forrester Research (FORR) the site references in the post, enterprises will spend much more in the coming years on social networking, RSS, blogs, widgets and such, making it a $4.6 billion market by 2013.

Here is an interesting data table from the ReadWriteWeb post (click on the image to make it larger):

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Twitter’s creators should be jumping up and down now that an actual business plan might be surfacing.

In fact, a lot of popular consumer products might not port over to the business market, even if the concept does.

And, naturally, the old grumps in the IT departments loom large over what gets into corporations and what does not, the ReadWriteWeb piece notes, although other enterprise departments like marketing are already enamored with Web 2.0 tools.

Still security and scaling issues remain paramount, and start-ups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT).

I saw real evidence of the shift at an event in Silicon Valley last week, related to Rohit Bhargava’s new book “Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get It Back.”

And, although I expected much more of a corporate love fest, since the affable Bhargava is an SVP of digital strategy and marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations, it turned out to be a very interesting discussion of ways companies could embrace Web 2.0.

I was particularly struck with the very sharp questions from the Silicon Valley-heavy corporate audience too, who were savvy but still curious about the potential pitfalls and benefits of such tools.

Such discussions will be even more interesting, as they percolate across the country to places where most people are just hearing the word widget.

You know, pretty much everywhere except here.

Ah, more pointless eye candy from BoomTown’s good friends at Facebook!

Not satisfied to just entertain the masses with inane Vampires and SuperPokes, the social-networking site unleashed Lexicon on users this week.

It’s kind of like Google Zeitgeist except… well, it is exactly the same concept, all part of Facebook’s admiration of Google (GOOG) things, like, for example, as many of its employees as it can entice away.

As Facebook’s Roddy Lindsay described it: “We thought it would be cool to show trends on the public and semi-public forums across Facebook (also known as Walls). Today we’re announcing the launch of Facebook Lexicon, a tool where you can see the buzz surrounding different words and phrases on Facebook Walls.”

But, as much as I hate a lot of these juvenile time-wasters online, I do like the very simple Lexicon very much, especially in its ability to compare up to five keywords or two-word phrases at once.

Thus, BoomTown is periodically going to post word comparisons here, always using Britney Spears as the control word, since she has been a perennial champ on Zeitgeist for a very long time.

So, today, it is presidential candidates–Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain.

As you can see, among users of Facebook, Britney holds up surprisingly well, even though she is going through a quieter, less-manic-head-shaving period of late.

(Click to make the images bigger)

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Mark Zuckerberg? Who’s that? Now, at Facebook, it’s apparently the Season of Sandberg!

Ah, the appeal of a fresh face is just irresistible to the press–OK, including BoomTown, except we posted more than a month ago!–with two major pieces, in Fortune and The Wall Street Journal, rolling out this week alone, with everything you wanted to know about the new COO of the social-networking site, former Google (GOOG) exec Sheryl Sandberg (pictured here).

But if you don’t have time to read them, here’s a quick synopsis of both:

Fortune: “Meet Facebook’s New Number Two” by Jessi Hempel

Details: Just 14 days into new job; Leg-tucking white Eames chair (pictured here); as Google’s VP global online sales and ops, ran everything!; she and Zuckerberg met cute at holiday party; aced Larry Summers’s midterm and final at Harvard public economics course, much to his shock, since he implies she was kind of chatty in class with friends.

Also Harvard MBA; obligatory McKinsey stint; Treasury Department in Clinton administration; picked 300-person Google over investment banking; always 10 steps ahead; Google.org mover and shaker.

Facebook aims: A need for corporate structure pronto; also time for the bigger picture; no more one-off decisions; more international growth; hiring senior managers; oh, yes, also must invent a new ad model for social networks.

But no silver bullets!; kicks ass, talks tough, then hugs all around (we did not make this up!); take out trash from Mark’s all-night Pizza-My-Heart-and-Red-Bull party (OK, we made that one up!).

Money quote: “This feels like Google when I started.”

The Wall Street Journal: “New Face at Facebook Hopes to Map Out a Road to Growth” by Carol Hymowitz

Details: Two weeks into new job; Biz dev guy Dan Rose is already sick of her (”It feels like she’s been here six months already.”); flip-flops endangered?; is able to argue why she is right by arguing how she is wrong; dangles data before engineers like fish before seals; easygoing but intense (when will these opposing dichotomies end?); crashed Harvard computers, but it was worth it.

Taught aerobics and was a stretching fascist; more cute dinner chatter with Zuckerberg before hiring; grew Google team from four to 4,000; a feminist and hangs with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda (see aerobics!) too!; Facebook pix of Argentine waterfall-leaning; went to high school in Miami; small kids, hubby; more 10 steps ahead and shoving people out of comfort zone.

Facebook aims: Employee performance reviews; processes for identifying and recruiting new employees; management-training programs; rally troops; stop the cash burn and up ad sales; close-knit culture must go, but you get hundreds of millions of new friends!

Also must figure out how to save Beacon’s bacon; earn trust of users, while frantically searching for a business model; wants frank feedback from staff and will publicly thank such person who gives it.

Money quote: “Facebook is a different space than Google, with tremendous potential to connect people, but it needs scale, it needs systems and processes to have impact, and I can do that.”

On its blog aimed at Facebook developers, the social-networking site said it would push back its massive Profile page redesign, which was supposed to roll out in early April.

It is now set for late spring, although the post specified no specific date.

Why?

Facebook said it was due to feedback the company had gotten from its legions of developers who rely on the Facebook universe for their oxygen.

"We're still iterating on the design, making sure we get it right. We'll still continue to roll out improvements to Platform as well," wrote Pete Bratach of Facebook. "And rest assured, we will give you a period of time so you can update your applications before the profile is released to our users."

Well, phew, as some big developers have been grumbling to me a lot of late about their many worries about the new look, which is sure to confound them, and more importantly, users no matter how good it is.

“They really have to roll this out perfectly,” said one big Facebook widget maker. “It really is the biggest thing since Beacon, and you know how that went.”

Indeed, the controversial ad program was not the smoothest moment for the social-networking site. But making big changes to what is the heart-and-soul of Facebook is a quantum level of difficulty higher.

It will require almost perfect execution technically speaking, huge educational efforts early and often for users and a total buy-in from third-party developers, whom Facebook made integral to its success when it made the very sharp move of opening its platform to them.

But don’t feel pressured Mark and Sheryl!

You can see some of the previews on this Facebook Previews page here and in the screenshot picture below (click on the image to make it larger).

And, as an added attraction for those developers, here is a video of the lovely Anna Nalik singing her hit, “Breathe,” in an even better “Grey’s Anatomy” video (I am a complete sucker for cheese):

Ah, nothing like crazy teenagers to ruin a social-networking site’s week!

Of course, a lot of the attention last week was aimed at MySpace, which had only a very peripheral role in the appalling story of a gang of teen harpies from Florida who viciously laid into another and videotaped it.

The unfortunate girl–whom the female wolf pack (to be fair, wolves are a lot more intelligent) was heard accusing incoherently in the video–had apparently posted something on MySpace–owned by News Corp. (NWS), which owns this site–that apparently ignited their rage. Thus, the genius leader of the half-dozen girls planned on posting a video of the beat-down to MySpace and also YouTube (GOOG).

The parents of the beaten girl, who was severely injured in the incident, urged the sites to prevent users from uploading the viral video, even though it was never uploaded by the teens and has been regularly taken off the services when it has been.

(I could not find the video on either service last night, except in snippets as part of news coverage. It is available on Salon here, and can also be embedded, which I decided not to do here.)

Still, the injured girl’s father was quoted in a local newspaper: “As far as I am concerned, MySpace is the anti-Christ for children.”

Actually, the gang of girls get that particular moniker in my estimation. In any case, justice will be meted out, I am sure, and it started with the judge’s order that the defendants not use any social network.

And while it got a lot less attention, don’t miss New York magazine’s riveting story of a Facebook scandal at New York’s tony Horace Mann private school.

In the piece, titled “Testing Horace Mann” by Gabriel Sherman, Facebook is used as a vehicle for disgruntled kids to create obnoxious groups attacking teachers they don’t like in verbally appalling ways and without any apparent recriminations.

Laid out in exquisite detail are how petty school politics, overindulged kids and parents who need their heads examined collided to create the digital equivalent of “Lord of the Flies.”

Here’s the money quote:

These Facebook pages, however, were something different. Kids have always ragged on an unpopular teacher or ridiculed an unfortunate classmate. But sites like Facebook and RateMyTeachers.com are changing the power dynamics of the community in an unpredictable way. It is as if students were standing outside the classroom window, taunting the teacher to her face. Should they be punished? There were, as yet, no rules or codes for how a school should address such issues.”

While it is pretty obvious that it is easy to blame the technology in both these cases, there are bigger societal issues at stake here that nothing MySpace or Facebook can fix with a simple tweak.

Yesterday, I moderated a panel at AlwaysOn’s Venture Summit East in Boston, called “Is There Still Upside in the Internet?”

Short answer: Always and forever, as long as there are venture capitalists with bags of other people’s money and enough rat holes to shove the cash down!

In all seriousness, it was a great discussion, centering on the lack of exit for start-ups via IPO, the slowing down of the M&A scene and a need to build businesses that have strong revenue outlooks.

As to hype? Social networking, of course! And underhyped? Mobile.

The panelists included: David Kidder, CEO, Clickable; Waikit Lau, Co-Founder, ScanScout; Bob Davis, General Partner, Highland Capital Partners; David Beisel, VP, Venrock; and, one of my personal favorite VCs and charmingest Yahoo (YHOO) board member, Eric Hippeau, Managing Director, Softbank Capital.

I gave Hippeau a teeny hard time about the MicroHoo situation (essentially, WTF!!?). He deftly ignored me and made the most salient point of the panel about the continuing transformative power of the Web.

(Thus, shaming me for my tiny-minded, here-and-now focus! Well, I was only ashamed just for a second, but it was a really long second!)

Here’s the video with interviews with Hippeau and others, including conference organizer Tony Perkins:

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.

Dear Sheryl,

First off, I hope you had a nice first day at Facebook as the new COO, or, as BoomTown is going to call you forthwith: Where-The-Buck-Now- Stops.

Now that you have been issued your official social-networking company flip-flops and gotten your arms around the Beacon issue (here’s a Cliff Note on that debacle for you: AVOID!), I am here at the head of the complaints line, ready to start yammering on.

And today’s yammer? For the love of SuperPokes, please fix Facebook’s mail!

While I know this is not in your purview (products are under Matt Cohler, who is under Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whom you are under), I really don’t care.

All I know is that it is a major problem within the Facebook service and its continued lameness will eventually strain your audience’s patience and, ultimately, its size. And a smaller audience means less advertising–which is your sweet spot!

If you don’t believe me, see where the lack of innovation with AOL’s (TWX) email service–which was once dominant–led. Hotmail (MSFT), Yahoo Mail (YHOO), Gmail (GOOG).

Why? Well, you could not do anything good with the mail, which was trapped inside AOL (the original blockers of data portability) and very few good options were available to save, store and manipulate it within the closed AOL service.

And there are even fewer features in your closed service. I cannot move the mail. I cannot sort it. I cannot search it. I cannot move it here and there.

What can I do? I can “Mark It As Unread,” “Mark It As Read” and “Delete” it. Wheeeeeee.

Currently, for example, I have 154 messages waiting for me in my Facebook email box that I cannot be bothered to open. Why?

Well, I already get alerted to them in my regular mail in full text, so why bother? Usually, I ask Facebook emailers to send me email directly to my regular email address in my reply.

As for sent mail? I can add a video, or share a link or send a gift (no, I am not sending you a digital ice cream cone ever!) and little else.

And while I know you have announced a soon-to-appear chat feature, it sounds suspiciously as under-featured at launch as your mail is now.

It apparently cannot be seen outside Facebook and will not integrate with popular services like AIM, third-party apps cannot be built on it and it is one-on-one only.

You can see the problem here. While I realize you would rather focus on more youth-loving stuff like your Wall (we’ll get to that later), it still seems as if top-notch communications apps should be a priority at Facebook if it wants to become, as Zuckerberg has said many times, my “social utility.”

And right now, mail–at least–is pretty useless.

Tomorrow: Data portability!

Today is the first day of work at Facebook for ex-Google executive Sheryl Sandberg, who will arrive at the social-networking company’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ to take up the job of COO.

At Google (GOOG), Sandberg was the vice president, Global Online Sales and Operations, a major post in which she ran a large swath of the search giant’s ad operations.

Sandberg was responsible for online sales of Google’s ad and publishing products, bringing experience Facebook sorely needs. Previously, she was also the chief of staff at the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration.

At Facebook, Sandberg will oversee a large part of the company, including all sales, human resources, marketing and communications, and business development.

Her job description essentially makes her No. 2 to Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, although it’s not characterized that way by him or the company.

But BoomTown is declaring it so, and plans to spend the first week of Sandberg’s tenure making suggestions on what she should get cracking on now.

No surprise, we have a million of them, well beyond our longtime complaint that third-party widgets on the site are juvenile (news flash–they still are!).

And even though our concerns are not all in Sandberg’s purview, we’re directing our suggestions her way, because, well, just because! (In actuality, the CFO and the technology and product divisions will report directly to Zuckerberg.)

Nonetheless, we want some action, including everything from improving the dreadful mail on Facebook, to giving users more ability to sort friends, to allowing data portability to figuring out a way to jack up Facebook’s ad business in a truly significant way.

Yes, that.

Today, though, we’ll give Sandberg time to move in to her office and unpack her boxes, and try to figure out where to eat now that the glories of the Google cafeteria are no longer available to her (that’s right, no more organic soy lattes or hand-fed, massaged-daily roast chicken for you!).

But tomorrow, as Scarlett O’Hara said, is another day.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.