Brad Fitzpatrick (brad) wrote,
Brad Fitzpatrick
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.
Tags: android, hacks, perlbal, tech
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pickle800

December 13 2008, 03:14:02 UTC 11 years ago

The merge worked fine for me, but was it supposed to import the facebook default pictures into gmail? I got all of my phone numbers/names/emails merged, but no photos? When addressbooker popped up asking if the merge was correct it showed each picture...
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brad

December 13 2008, 19:53:48 UTC 11 years ago

Yeah, haven't done that yet.
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Anonymous

December 13 2008, 20:16:33 UTC 11 years ago

That would definitely be a sweet feature to put the facebook defaults onto your phone. From the looks of it, you are a strong supporter of android, which easily syncs android with google contacts. Since the addition of google sync for blackberrys, the same abilities are available for those phones too. I'm really excited to be able to eventually sync my facebook info onto my storm (through google).

Any idea when you'd get around to figuring out a way to get the pictures from facebook (you already get them into addressbooker properly) imported correctly into gmail?
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