CB friends needs a better layout

With Facebook becoming so popular and fast to use.

We need to be able to mimic some of its most common and basic tasks on our smaller social networks.

The current friends list/ connections system on CB is not what I would expect for a profile component as advanced as CB...it seems to be in the dark ages with no way to organize or find users unless you cycle through the entire list. It takes up valuable screen space...and runs a little slow.

I have well over 300 connections on my list...finding one user seems impossible,
no search no alphabetization. Not even an option for gird view or anything.

I find myself adding friends and then never hitting that tab again and relying on the search function to find them again (if I remember their name)

Has anyone made a new layout or plugin for this?

It'll be completely rewritten with release of CB 2.0 gaining many of the features users are familiar with on other sites (such as searching for example). Am not aware of a rewrite unfortunately, sorry. You could use an advanced filter on a userlist that shows a userlist of just the viewing users friends.