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Question
Is there an relatively painless way to export contacts from Facebook?

Background
I'm helping my wife get contact info for her network. I've read the answer to this related question on getting FB contacts into gMail but:

  • That greasemonkey script is way too complicated for my wife
  • This guy admits that he barely knew what he was doing when he wrote the tool
  • According to his most recent update, facebook has changed their site and, thereby, broken his script
  • I don't care where the data goes, it doesn't have to be gMail, I just need it out of facebook. It could end up in notepad for all I care!

I've read related questions that deal with email info but I mainly need phone numbers.

There must be an easier solution for getting this done. In fact, my Android phone has a widget that gives access to my facebook phonebook so there MUST be some way to get this data out. It's so sad that this isn't already built into facebook--their walled garden can be so frustrating.

EDIT:
Bounty added. If anyone can give me any remotely useful advice on how to pull the phone numbers for my facebook contacts, I'll give full bounty.

2
  • It's possible on your Android device because it was made by Facebook.
    – Lipis
    Jul 16, 2010 at 21:45
  • Phone number is not made available via the Facebook API, which is likely why options are limited. Jul 29, 2010 at 15:54

5 Answers 5

1

I also have this need, but have not found a perfect solution yet. Here is my semi-painful solution:

First I registered at Backupify, they generate a backup of my Facebook data once in a while.
And here is what I do when I want to sync from Facebook to my address book:

  1. In the Backupify, open the `***_MetaData` file, where *** is your Facebook name.
  2. In each line of this file, retrieve facebook id, name, birthday, current location.

I actually wrote a trivial script that filters out the friends whose facebook id is not already in my address book, to produce an HTML list of links to the missing friends' Facebook info pages, from where I can copy-paste.

Getting the phone numbers automatically would probably require screen-scraping, which I don't do.

I have given up on:

  • Full automation.
  • Synchronization of contacts that I have already in my address book.

But I would be glad if someone came with a better solution.

1
  • Note: Because it does not do scraping, but just provides links to Facebook pages, I believe it does not break Facebook's Terms Of Service.
    – nic
    Jul 26, 2010 at 6:26
1

Use Yahoo

  1. http://address.yahoo.com/ Sign in to yahoo Address book (create one if you don't have one)

  2. At the top you will see some FB icon. Click that.

  3. You'll see another screen with FB/Gmail/etc icons to import. Click FB

  4. Say yes to share your info

  5. Done

If it doesn't work, open your Facebook page and choose “Application Settings” under Account. Next remove the “Yahoo! Contact Importer” application from your Facebook profile and try the steps again.

Once in Yahoo, you can export to CSV as well

4
  • This exports email address and birthday only no ?
    – phwd
    Jul 25, 2010 at 11:46
  • Hmm, I thought it was whatever was available? (I could be wrong here)
    – Wil
    Jul 25, 2010 at 16:58
  • Just email addresses Jul 21, 2011 at 12:05
  • Yahoo have recently made it so contacts imported from Facebook are not exportable. You have to edit the contact in some way before you can export it. That means touching every single contact.
    – ale
    Feb 8, 2013 at 13:46
0

Another way I found.

http://www.waded.org/2009/08/backing-up-contacts-from-facebook/

But it has added cost as per the blogger.

A warning: Using this technique, as far as I know, will send an email to each contact’s address inviting that person to also use Windows Live. This appears to be its cost. This is not stated clearly by Windows Live, so I’m warning you here, and I’m hoping Windows Live clarifies & provides opt-out option in the future. I still think it’s worth doing.

1
  • Link is dead - that's exactly why answers should be full descriptions instead of links. There is a backup here. Don't forget to donate to the Internet Archive, people!
    – Carolus
    Apr 22, 2021 at 9:41
0

I use a service called MemoToo and you can check out how I set it up on my blog.

A much easyer way is to use a hosted service like MemoToo and you can check out how I set it up on my blog.

If you go to http://memotoo.com and setup an account you can have your contacts synced with tons of services including:

  • Outlook
  • Google Contacts
  • Google Calander
  • Facebook (One way)
  • LinkedIn (One way)
  • Windows Live Contacts
  • Yahoo Contacts
  • Twitter
  • Windows Mobile
  • Android
  • Plaxo
  • Soocial
  • SheduleWorld
  • UNYK
  • Vodafone 360 (this is a realy crap service though)
  • And tones more

Its also ver cheap and you only need to pay £12 per year if you have more than 50 contacts. I have 2000+ and it work just fine.

I did have a couple of hours of De-duping to do afterwords with so many services, but once you have sone that once all is good. Most dups can be deleted, but if you have a contact on Facebook and LinkedIn it is better to merge them.

The problem I have with most sync tool or scripts is that they are one time afairs that leave tonds of duplicates when you re-run them. MemoToo knows which contacts are on multiple services and automaticaly merges them once you tell it that they are the same person.

0

One method of getting some contact data from Facebook is via the Download your information tool on Facebook itself. This only includes names, FB-friends-since dates, and emails.

How to export:

Adapted instructions from Facebook Help Centre

To download a copy of your Facebook data:

  1. Navigate here or perform steps 2-5.
  2. Click the downward arrow in the top right of Facebook.
  3. Select Settings & privacy, then click Settings.
  4. In the left column, click Your Facebook information.
  5. Next to Download your information, click View.
  6. Click Deselect all on the right-hand side of Facebook.
  7. Toggle the Friends checkbox below it.
  8. Select the format of your download request (HTML or JSON) from the middle.
  9. Click Create file to confirm the download request.

After you've made a download request, it will appear as pending in the Available copies section of the Download your information tool. It may take several hours for them to finish preparing your download request.

Once they are finished preparing your download request, they'll send a notification and email letting you know it's ready.

To download a copy of the data that you requested:

  1. Go to the Available copies section of the Download your information tool.
  2. Click Download and enter your password.

For myself, I also edited the HTML file with a regex-compatible find-and-replace tool in a text editor (some will freeze due to everything being on a single line) to remove all the lines with FB-friends-since dates.

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