Facebook’s webmail platform is so inefficient that even minor changes (like adding the ability to send to outside email addresses last year) can make a big difference in usability.

They are now adding basic search functionality to email (see screen shots). Previously there was not way to find emails other than scrolling through the pages one by one. Some users have thousands of emails in their inbox, so old messages became essentially unfindable.

Only some Facebook users have this feature now. It will presumably roll out to others shortly.

There is still a lot more to do to make Facebook email really usable, but this is a good start.

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Facebook has posted more details about the upcoming redesign of user profiles, which were supposed to launch early April but are apparently now close at hand.

Profiles will be broken down into 5 main tabs: Feed, Wall, Info, Photos, and “Boxes”. The feed tab appears to contain the News Feed as we know it, except with three new size standards: one line, short, and full.

There’s also a bit of confusion between this Feed tab and the new Wall one. Apparently users will be able to post items to friends’ Feed tabs (and their own) using a new Publisher tool. This is described as meant to replace the old wall attachments feature, so it appears as though the Wall will revert to plain text posts and no longer allow for rich media. But it will also incorporate all mini-feed items somehow.

Some suggest that the new Publisher feature will allow for FriendFeed-like conversations through comments, but the official documentation doesn’t make any reference to such capabilities. Screen shots showing comments appear to be only wall-to-wall conversations.

The “Boxes” tab will be where all the current application profile boxes are quarantined, er, showcased. While 5 tabs will show by default, users will be able to add their own tabs that display canvas-like pages for their favorite apps. This appears to be a trade-off Facebook is imposing on developers: isolate their profile boxes in a “boxes” tab but compensate them by allowing for more prominent, full-view pages. That said, Facebook will also be allowing up to 5 app boxes to show up across all tabs in the left-hand column (but they’ll have a severe height restriction).

Unfortunately Facebook has yet to release any screenshots of the new design except for the rather uninformative one above.

More information at Inside Facebook.

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Mark Zuckerberg loves to hire folks from Google. His poaching started in earnest last year, and includes Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, CFO Gideon Yu, and others. The latest is Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president of global communications and public affairs. He will join Facebook on May 14 under the same role. Zuckerberg’s letter to the troops leaked to us:

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 May 14, although you may see him around the office before then.

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There are plenty of feed readers on Facebook. None are particularly popular. News apps, in general, don’t do well on Facebook (it is not even a major app category). But Ankesh Kumar, the CEO of Grouptivity, thinks he has a news app that taps into the viral hooks on Facebook. It is called Social News and it just launched (although, to make things confusing, there is another Digg-like app by the same name). Apps for MySpace and Hi5 will be next.

Social News, like Grouptivity, is a combination feed reader/social bookmarking service. (Grouptivity raised a $2 million angel round in May, 2006, mostly from Kumar, who previously sold two staffing startups to Kronos and Monster, respectively). Rather than responding to an explicit thumbs-up or thumbs-down, news headlines get voted up every time they are bookmarked, e-mailed, or shared on your News Feed in Facebook. Any kind of sharing is counted as a vote, and when you e-mail an article through the app it automatically gets saved as a bookmark.

The app is pre-populated with news feeds from the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other sources (including TechCrunch). Readers can delete or add and blog or news feed they like, and any action taken (bookmarking, e-mailing, sharing) shows up in your Facebook News feed and is shown to all of your friends on Facebook. The problem, for many users, is that it does not save the bookmarks to Digg or del.icio.us, but rather to Grouptivity.

One way Kumar hopes to gain users is by recruiting readers directly from partner blogs and news sites. He is basically offering a way to turn any news feed into a Facebook app. For instance, he’s already struck deals with Hearst to add this functionality to the sites for its regional papers. And he has created a plug-in for WordPress that creates a “share” button so that feed can be read through Social News on Facebook. For new users who come in through publishers, only that Website’s feed will be appear on the app at first—although others can be added.

Blogs that want to create a Facebook presence that goes beyond merely republishing their feeds might find this appealing. It is an implicit recommendation system that shows someone’s entire Facebook network what news stories they are bookmarking and sharing. But will this be enough to get people to start using it?

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A new app from the American Social Health Association aims to spread Chlamydia on Facebook to raise awareness of the disease.

The Morph Monkey Facebook app looks fairly benign at the start. Users can select pictures of their friends to see what their combined child will look like. As the user goes to morph the images, a pop up box informs them that they’ve given their friend Chlamydia (video demo above).

It’s a clever way of spreading the message on Facebook, but I’m not sure how many people will be impressed by being tricked into running an app that is just a marketing tool with a health message. You can try it out here.

thanks to Michael Seibel for the tip

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Facebook email, which they call messages, is a completely unusable as a personal or business productivity tool. When I first joined facebook it was fine. I only had a few friends on the service, and people didn’t do much with it except to occasionally say hi.

But as Facebook usage has exploded, particularly where I live in the tech world, so has messaging. For many of my contacts Facebook messaging is the only way I stay in contact with them, and it is increasingly becoming the pitch platform of choice. Instead of emailing TechCrunch directly, entrepreneurs will add me as a friend on Facebook, and then send their pitch for a story.

To ignore these messages would kill off a rich source of information. But the product is so feature poor that all I can do is respond as fast as possible to Facebook messages with “please email this to me at TechCrunch” and move on.

For starters, simply opening emails has a serious lag time – Facebook as a whole has slowed down significantly as their growth has exploded, and it is most obvious with messaging. At this point I’ll open the inbox and then open the 5 or 10 top messages in new tabs – and come back later once they’ve loaded and read them.

Other things you can’t do with Facebook email: forward them, put them in folders, tag them, or archive them. You can’t search them at all, so finding old messages is effectively impossible. If you are getting 20 or more new messages a day and can’t constantly watch for new ones, some will drop to the next page before you see them and be lost forever.

Advanced features are also lacking, of course. There is no POP or IMAP access to pull Facebook emails into other applications like Outlook or Mac Mail.

Facebook has made small changes over time to email. In August 2007 the started allowing people to send messages to outside email addresses. And in December 2007 they started forwarding messages in the notifications sent out to your normal email messages (prior to that you had to click on the message link).

But for the most part they’ve left the product static and focused on new products like chat and enhancing the news feed.

What would be ideal is for Facebook to simply add access to email via their API and let third parties build web and desktop mail applicaitons that can sort, search and otherwise manage messages. But that functionality doesn’t exist, and Facebook has shown little tolerance for third party applicaitons that solve user problems in innovative but unauthorized ways.

Something needs to be done, though. Facebook needs to fix email themselves (by “fix I mean add basic features and allow exporting of messages via standard protocols), or allow third parties to do it for them.

I suspect based on conversations with Facebook insiders that they are working on feature enhancements already. But based on their very closed approach to Facebook chat, it’s clear that they want as much activity and data to stay on their servers as possible. My hope is that they reconsider the approach, and let Facebook emails go free into the wild.

I am clearly a non-standard user of email, and most users won’t have the same level of frustration…yet. But eventually mainstream frustration will equal the levels I’m feeling now. It is far better to address this now, than later.

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In case you needed any proof that the No.1 activity on Facebook is goofing off, the chart above from Flowing Data shows the number of applications by category. About half of the 23, 160 applications on Facebook fall into the “Just for Fun” or “Gaming” categories. “Dating” and “Chat” are also high up the list. “Money,” “Classifieds,” and “File Sharing” are the least popular.

Facebook is a marketplace of sorts. It stands to reason that application developers are chasing the categories where they are a seeing the most usage. No surprises here, but a chart like this really drives the point home.

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When Facebook officially unveiled its plans for Facebook Chat in March, many accused the company of creating yet another walled garden. The company’s proprietary chat protocol was not Jabber/XMPP-compliant, it didn’t incorporate other IM services like AIM and MSN onsite, and no APIs were provided for developers.

Nonetheless Digsby, a multiprotocol desktop client like Trillium and Adium but with more social network integrations, has figured out a way to incorporate Facebook Chat. Digsby users can now chat with their Facebook friends alongside their AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber contacts. And they don’t even have to visit Facebook to do so.

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Chinese social networking site Xiaonei has raised $430 million in funding from Softbank, according to a report from VentureBeat.

Xiaonei was founded in December 2005 by Qinghua University graduates Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and Jacky, then was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. As of November 2007, the site was said to be the most popular social networking site among university students in China, with 15 million registered users and 8.8 million active users.

The company likes to call itself the Facebook of China, and we’d never guess why (screenshot below.) Now how did the song go again? here comes another……

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Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nonetheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.

Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SIA decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.

The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.

Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)

Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SIA gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.

But what are you gonna do? At least SIA acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.

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