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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Facebook just changed their markup

ext_105936

May 8 2009, 19:41:25 UTC 10 years ago

Of course, the day I find this, Facebook updates their address book code, so the script doesn't work anymore:
Required element 'summary' not found; aborting.

I'll check back later — would submit a patch if I knew more Javascript. :)

Thanks for creating this!
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Re: Facebook just changed their markup

brad

May 9 2009, 22:35:17 UTC 10 years ago

I've now fixed it. Try again!
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Re: Facebook just changed their markup

Anonymous

May 9 2009, 23:09:49 UTC 10 years ago

I'm getting an error:
Didn't find phonebook right for: Aaron Adams

The name has been changed to protect the innocent...
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Re: Facebook just changed their markup

Anonymous

May 10 2009, 11:15:41 UTC 10 years ago

still getting an error since your update:

"Couldn't find pattern i - j of K"

any thoughts?
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Re: Facebook just changed their markup

brad

May 11 2009, 03:15:02 UTC 10 years ago

Now fixed.
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