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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Done before.

Anonymous

December 14 2008, 15:50:29 UTC 11 years ago

Facebook Scavenger was a Firefox extension that allowedyou to export your friends' contact info, including e-mail addresses: http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-scavenger/

Facebook will most certainly send you takedown notice as well.
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Re: Done before.

Anonymous

December 15 2008, 14:41:05 UTC 11 years ago

Thanks for the great hack! I was just looking for a nice way to update information in my contacts list for the G1, and this seems to do the trick (at least for phone numbers). Addresses would be great too. :)

It does look like you are out of your AppEngine URL fetching quota though:

raise self.exception
OverQuotaError: The API call urlfetch.Fetch() required more quota than is available.

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