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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brad

December 1 2008, 16:51:09 UTC 11 years ago

Isn't this against the Facebook terms of service?

I don't know.

There was a very useful Mac Address Book sync tool but it was shutdown because exporting contact details from Facebook is, apparently, against their TOS :(

Well, this isn't a Facebook App, so not sure what would be shut down.

Didn't Plaxo get a few users in trouble when they launched their Facebook sync tool as well?

That tool slammed the hell out of Facebok's servers, so people using it (Scoble) had their accounts suspended for rate limit abuses. The Greasemonkey script I wrote does just a couple HTTP requests (one per 50 friends w/ phone numbers), spaced ~1 second apart... very human-speed.

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bewlay_brother

December 13 2008, 19:56:09 UTC 11 years ago

Facebook's problem with Plaxo wasn't that they were aggressively accessing pages, it was that they were harvesting Facebook user info for their own purposes.

An address book exporting is more benign — it's not a competitive threat, for example — but it still violates the spirit of Facebook's ToS, which is to guarantee that every user has full control over their data at all times.
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