AddressBooker & exporting my Facebook Phonebook: brad

AddressBooker & exporting my Facebook Phonebook

This 4-day weekend was awesome for catching up on personal hacking projects. In addition to adding IPv6 support to Perlbal and hacking on my interactive shadow/art wall more, I also worked on a little address book management tool, AddressBooker [source here].

Basically AddressBooker takes a POST of contacts data in JSON form, and does stuff with it, where "stuff" is currently limited to merging it into your Google Contacts. (GMail, Android, etc) This was my experiment in learning GData, AuthSub, and App Engine a bit more.

Anyway, I then wanted to get my Facebook Phonebook exported to my Google Contacts, so it'd sync to my Android phone. I didn't see an export option in Facebook (maybe I missed it?), so I wrote a little GreaseMonkey script instead to automate the whole process:

http://bradfitz.com/greasemonkey/facebook_phonebook_export.user.js

If you have Firefox and GreaseMonkey, then click the above link and it'll ask if you want to install it. Install it, then go to your Facebook Phonebook ~~(sorry, no permalink to it)~~, then go into Tools > GreaseMonkey > User Script Commands... > and you'll see Export Facebook Phonebook. That'll then page through your phone book (you should probably start on page 1: it's kinda flaky) and extract the data, and then POST it to AddressBooker for you, which will then guide you through merging it into your Google Contacts.

Enjoy!

(And keep in mind I barely know browser stuff or Greasemonkey or Python or App Engine or GData, so patches welcome!... brad@danga.com, or Github)

Update 2009-05-09: Updated the JavaScript to work with Facebook's new layout.

Update 2010-06-06: Facebook's markup changed again, but I'm too lazy to go update the script. Patches welcome.

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 499, in __call__ handler.get(*groups) File "/base/data/home/apps/addressbooker/1.329670894575284061/addressbooker.py", line 345, in get self.ProcessMerge(method='GET') File "/base/data/home/apps/addressbooker/1.329670894575284061/addressbooker.py", line 431, in ProcessMerge feed = client.Get(full_feed_url, converter=gdata.contacts.ContactsFeedFromString) File "/base/data/home/apps/addressbooker/1.329670894575284061/gdata/service.py", line 700, in Get headers=extra_headers) File "/base/data/home/apps/addressbooker/1.329670894575284061/atom/service.py", line 176, in request data=data, headers=all_headers) File "/base/data/home/apps/addressbooker/1.329670894575284061/gdata/auth.py", line 456, in perform_request return http_client.request(operation, url, data=data, headers=headers) File "/base/data/home/apps/addressbooker/1.329670894575284061/gdata/alt/appengine.py", line 144, in request method=method, headers=all_headers, follow_redirects=False)) File "/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/urlfetch.py", line 278, in fetch raise ResponseTooLargeError(result) ResponseTooLargeError

55 comments

davidglasser

December 1 2008, 18:38:57 UTC 11 years ago

New comment

Oh, man, I wanted this just last week.

Hmm, does it do any sort of search-and-merge with the Google contacts, or does it always create new ones?

December 1 2008, 19:02:01 UTC 11 years ago

Apparently I have too many Google contacts already:

brad

December 1 2008, 19:08:03 UTC 11 years ago

I was worried about that. Frustrating App Engine limits.

Okay, I'll have to fix that next time I get some free time.

Great idea!

ext_123838

December 11 2008, 22:36:19 UTC 11 years ago

I've been looking for an app like this, but sadly I get the same error as I have too many contacts I guess?

Anyway, if you feel inspired to fix this, it would be much appreciated...