
Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts - tobtoh
http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/
======
kdeldycke
Looks like the project was just deleted from Google Code. I always get a "403
Forbidden" page each time I try to access the project page.

Fortunately, the binary extension is still downloadable at this URL: fb-
exporter.googlecode.com/files/fb-exporter.crx

~~~
kdeldycke
Source code has a better value than the binary: I'm sure Facebook will deploy
some counter-measures pretty soon, making the binary unusable.

Nobody's got the source code ? I tried to checked it out but I get 403's
again...

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w1ntermute
I would highly recommend against using this tool, as it is against Facebook's
Terms of Service. Robert Scoble was kicked off Facebook in January 2008 for
pulling a stunt exactly like this ([http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-
kicked-off-of-face...](http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-
of-facebook/)). While his fame and contacts allowed him to get his account
reinstated in short order, many of us might not be so fortunate.

~~~
joe_the_user
Well,

I'd be curious what would happen if thousand of people used the tool rather a
lone researcher.

As we saw with Facebook's censorship and uncensorship of lamebook.com, their
"terms" seem to be essentially "we'll do what we can get away with and back-
off if enough people push back".

~~~
bruceboughton
A couple of thousand does not a revolt make.

~~~
neilk
If things that begin small aren't worth doing, then nothing is worth doing.

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davidmat
Or... you can just link up facebook with your old Yahoo mail address.(the one
from the 90s you still keep around and check every 6 months or so ;)

This lets you import your facebook contacts in your yahoo address book, so you
can export them as csv later.

~~~
kacy
^^ What he said. I did this, and it exported my 800+ contacts in less than a
minute. Then I imported them to Address Book for Mac and used AddressBookSync
(<http://danauclair.com/addressbooksync/>) to grab the facebook profile
pictures and add them to each contact.

------
blhack
edit: I mis-spoke. You'd need to request the email address from each user
individually. Okay, I admit, that is kindof sucky. That said, I _completely_
understand this move. My guess is that this is to prevent "farmville" from
dumping a list of all of my friends' emails, and then spamming them.

Isn't this all available via the Open Graph API?

([http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web#personalizati...](http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web#personalization))

Edit: Yes, it absolutely is:

<http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api>

About halfway down the page, click the link after the word "friends" for a
JSON of your friends and their UIDs. Fetch this and iterate through the IDS
for basic info.

Fetch this url: <https://graph.facebook.com/$facebook_uid>

here is my info: <https://graph.facebook.com/ryanseamus>

~~~
natrius
Email addresses aren't in there. When I look at my own info, I see a
@proxymail.facebook.com email address, which is presumably what an app would
use to email me. It's not what you'd want for exporting contact info.

~~~
joe_the_user
yes: _"Getting an access token for a user with no extended permissions allows
you to access the information that the user has made available to everyone on
Facebook. If you need specific information about a user, like their email
address or work history, you must ask for the specific extended permissions.
"_

~~~
natrius
You can only get information about one user at a time that way. Exporting the
data can't be done. If you disagree, write the code.

------
mattsidesinger
I thought you could export all of your Facebook friends email addresses using
Yahoo Mail or Hotmail I opened a new Yahoo Mail account last week and did
this...did they remove it? I thought that there was a big uproar because Gmail
users were not able to do this so Google blocked Facebook from exporting Gmail
contacts.

Regardless, this sounds like a great extension and you should not have to open
a mail account with Yahoo or MS to export your friends. This is an excellent
idea!

~~~
joe_the_user
Yes but that's only because Yahoo and MS have a deal with Facebook and you
don't know how long it will last.

Facebook was explicit in their reply to Google that they feel they can block
people exporting their friend's emails. Friend emails are exported by the
"export tool" - in fact, you get but a list of names from that.

I would be very interested in looking at the code and noting people's
experience with this. One writer was kicked off Facebook for exporting his
address two years ago.

------
wibblenut
I'm trying to get all of my friends to use .tel domains. That way they _own_
their data and I can discover all of their URIs dynamically (through DNS) from
various apps. It doubles up as a web based "business card", which makes it a
slightly easier sell.

~~~
JeremyBanks
Why .tel, rather than a more common TLD?

~~~
mgcross
I was curious too; from wikipedia:

"In contrast to other top-level domains .tel information is stored directly
within the Domain Name System (DNS), within the actual domain name record, as
opposed to the DNS simply returning details (such as IP addresses) of the
machines on which information can be found."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel>

------
asmosoinio
I wanted to test this, but never found a way to activate it... How do you
activate this?

There is no "how to" text on the project page either (or I didn't find it).

~~~
keryor
There should be a red link in the top right corner of your facebook page that
says "Export friends!" (right to the left of the "Home" link).

Once you click that, just follow the accompanying instructions and it should
work - although be warned it takes a long time, especially if you're doing it
for a lot of "Friends".

~~~
jp_sc
It only works when Facebook is in english

------
ivan_ah
Apparently the extension made it to the "open sea" of torrents ;)
[http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/255130489/fb-
exporter?tab...](http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/255130489/fb-
exporter?tab=summary)

I have been waiting for this extension for soooo long. I can finally quit!

hashes of file fb-exporter.crx: MD5 d2ae04feae8df535025e572a8030a3ee sha1
ccc0a1213b6427cb019b36dbfacdc7770c6bec23

------
quadhome
I felt the same way about my Facebook messages. Before they released the
archive tool, I wrote this:

<http://fb.quadhome.com/>

I wonder if, since the Chrome extension is Javascript, it could be injected
into a bookmarklet and made to run on anyone's browser...

~~~
antimatter15
The Chrome extension looks like it includes more than just the exporting code,
which does look like something that could be fairly trivially made into a
bookmarklet. [http://code.google.com/p/fb-
exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-...](http://code.google.com/p/fb-
exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-exporter.js)

But it also has the ability to automagically use OAuth to connect with gmail
to upload contact information.

------
nikcub
somebody needs to get the facebook mobile apps and reverse engineer them to
figure out how their own apps are able to extract all friend contact info
(email, phone #s)

mimicking an official client would be a lot better than this extension which
relies on facebook leech detection not noticing the requests and banning you

~~~
joe_the_user
Finding the official mobile seems like a moving target as Facebook's API is
constantly changing.

This is latest QT thing I can find:

<http://gitorious.org/qfacebook> (supersedes Google's port of an iphone
library).

But access might depend more on permissions than the library. Information on
this would be GOOD to have.

------
cvander
Forbidden

Your client does not have permission to get URL /p/fb-exporter/ from this
server.

------
n-named
Why does this need access to my browsing history? :(

~~~
Groxx
It's a bit of an alarmist, though accurate, alert: anything which has access
to your tabs (ie, anything which can observe / inject into a page) also has
access to your "history" as it can see what you're browsing. I'm sure other
permissions also trip this, but "tabs" is one of the most common, and I ran
across it recently too: <http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tabs.html>

edit: I'd assume "history" also trips the history alert:
<http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/history.html>

edit again: the extension has "tabs" permission only. Very little to worry
about, unless you're paranoid about your browsing history.

~~~
chrischen
If you are paranoid, use incognito. Extensions are disabled in incognito mode
by default.

------
socialgrapher
The recently launched OSS project
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/themycubevault/> is looking for plugin
developers to do exactly this kind of data export. I will try and port the JS
extension to run there instead.

------
pbhjpbhj
Can't you just use the downloader and download all your data?

Edit: go to <https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php> and then click the
"learn more" link, then download. I think they email you when the download is
compiled.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Doesn't include email addresses, which is what this whole kerfluffle is about.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Ah, OK, thanks for the elucidation.

------
cfinke
I wrote a similar tool two years ago:

[http://www.chrisfinke.com/2008/01/03/take-your-facebook-
data...](http://www.chrisfinke.com/2008/01/03/take-your-facebook-data-with-
you/)

If my experience is any indication, the author will be receiving a takedown
notice shortly.

~~~
A1kmm
They don't, however, seem to mention their names anywhere. If Facebook knows
the name of the author, they can threaten to ban them from Facebook if they
don't take it down (about the only leverage they have to exploit).

However, to get a real name, they would need to get Google to reveal an IP
address, and then the user's ISP to reveal account details - hardly a simple
process.

Google isn't going to hand over the IP of the authors, so they would need to
file a (probably baseless) lawsuit and try to subpoena the names - something
Google is likely to fight since the software is in their interests too.

~~~
cfinke
Looks like it has indeed been taken down. The author should have seeded it on
BitTorrent instead.

~~~
ivan_ah
torrent is here <http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/255130489/fb-exporter>

------
mick_schroeder
why not add the ability to get phone numbers too?

~~~
blntechie
There is a Sony Ericsson application in Facebook which retrieves all your
friends' phone numbers and upload it to their servers which then can be synced
with any Sony Ericsson phone . Then I can download it as CSV by connecting the
phone to the PC. A round about way but it works. So I guess there might be
other apps which does this.

~~~
riffraff
wouldn't this be in violation of the tos and/or technically impossible? If
not, why can't I write a fb app that syncs all my friends' data to my server?

~~~
niels
No, because FB has allowed them access to these data.

------
bbk
There was a article on this on techcrunch. [Techcrunch blocked at work. Cant
post the link now].

tl;dr for the TC post:

1.Create a dummy yahoo email id.

2.Import friends from facebook.

3\. Export contacts as csv.

4\. Import in Gmail.

------
daniel_iversen
And how much do you want to bet that the developer og this plugin works for
Google ;) .... let the mud slinging begin ;)

------
lewi
This is gold!

Facebook is gonna get so angry. I wonder what their next move will be.

~~~
antimatter15
Found this [http://code.google.com/p/fb-
exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-...](http://code.google.com/p/fb-
exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-exporter.js#238)

if (request.pissOffZuckerberg) { startExportFriendData(); }

~~~
diogomonica
I get a Forbidden when trying to access this!

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castis
Has this tool been taken down?

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forkrulassail
What happened to this tool?

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wiks
Hell Ya!!!!

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timinman
AwwwsOoOoOome!

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quizbiz
Talk about hacker news... no?

