Finally Google Chrome Extension that can Exports Your Facebook Contacts

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By Salar Golestanian @ Friday, November 26, 2010 :: 1:35 AM :: 401 Views :: 0 Comments ::

I just love it when Big Brother battles Big Brother. "Facebook VS Google" .. lets see who will win the game.

This is what the Open Source Initiative OSI - The MIT License Developer is saying.

"Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends is a Chrome extension to export your Facebook friends' contact data.
Despite what Facebook says, if someone is your "friend" and you can see his/her email address on his/her Facebook info, they are probably OK with you emailing them.
Facebook doesn't let you export this data, so they expect you to click on each of your friends' pages, copy their email address (or other contact information), and paste it into your email client. Kind of ridiculous? Yes.
Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends will let you export all (or some) of your friends' contact info, to CSV or directly to your Google Contacts (GMail)."

I have not tried it but some bloggers say it does work. A few weeks ago I wanted to send a personal email to all my friends in FaceBook for the Movember Charity Cause through outlook. and I could not do this as I had to scraping and exporting your contacts into both Gmail and CSV files even though it might take awhile and multiple tries if you’ve got hundreds of friends. And while the extension is not officially affiliated with Google (or Facebook), it going to be exciting to see what happens to it after this post. May be Facebook will convert the emails to images so the extension stops working.

The Problem for FaceBook is that this is an Open Source Extension and therefore, it might be harder for Facebook to block, as browser extensions can make scraping seem indistinguishable from actual users clicking in their browsers. This is really clever and possibly The Berlin Wall of data portability for FB has started to crumble.

Here are a few of things that FaceBook could do next:

Patent the "In Your Face!" (Lawyers will be very happy)
Block Google Chrome and embrace Internet Explorer. (Microsoft will be very happy)
Sue FB-exporter for breaching and stealing private information. (Doubtful)

Just trying to get a handle on the politics of it all, here is couple of questions:

Does FaceBook Own your friends? Another word, does FaceBook owns the data you put in about your friends, ie their email address, website, etc....?
Does FaceBook think that your friends would strongly mind if you ever decide to email them as a list?

Since the obvious answer is "no" and "no" this extension is indeed going to help us export the info to Google Contacts (Gmail) from there you can take it to your outlook. So go and get the Extension from here. http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/