Only a couple years after users were banned for trying to import their Facebook contacts into other services, Yahoo! has launched a new service which enables you to import all of your Facebook contacts’ email addresses. Interestingly enough, this has nothing to do with applications that were granted access to users’ emails as Facebook recently enabled. While Yahoo! has announced that the service is live, we can’t currently access it.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification on what service Yahoo! is using to import contacts. If this project was launched with support from Facebook, this could be part of a broader strategy of openness on Facebook’s part. However, does this mean that we could soon see services like Twitter and Google Buzz granted access to the same type of service?
We doubt it. Contact imports is the critical viral component from most online products and I seriously doubt Facebook wants to grant competitors’ access to this type of functionality. While contact importing is only one feature within Yahoo!, the company previously announced a broad strategy in December of the company wide implementation of Facebook Connect.
This new contact importer doesn’t appear to have the standard Facebook Connect implementation though which makes me wonder about the technical implementation of this service. We’ll be sure to update this post once we hear more information from Facebook.
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I would extremely wish such a function for GMail!!
I've always searched for method to import my Facebook contacts into my Google Contacts…
Comment by Steven — March 4, 2010 @ 11:36 am
Facebook has long offered special access to certain partners through channels besides Facebook Connect, such as contact syncing on certain mobile devices and contact syncing with Windows Live Mail.
The biggest difference here is that this seems to be the first such connection which offers users an easy, unobtrusive way to export their Facebook friends' e-mail addresses. If so, users can finally backup/export nearly all of their Facebook information. (Certain other contact info, such as street addresses and IM screen names, remain excluded.)
Comment by theharmonyguy — March 4, 2010 @ 11:40 am
yahoo will not be able to do this safely. they are terrible acknowledging spam.
Comment by darla frakes — March 4, 2010 @ 11:40 am
I wonder if I can download the contacts into my old yahoo account, then export them and import them back into my Gmail.
Time to try :p
Comment by Raryn — March 4, 2010 @ 2:14 pm
I wonder, what's Facebook's attitude to this new service?
Was this launch approved by Facebook?
Comment by Yulia Gurelya — March 5, 2010 @ 12:32 am
I was able to use the import in Yahoo
Comment by Facebook User — March 5, 2010 @ 6:04 am
be double or triple,and dont make sacrifice everything from scalability because every terms and title have the system of net work,you must have the private law because be like generate father and son
Comment by Andre Isakandar — March 5, 2010 @ 6:17 am
Was unable to import contacts from Facebook. It says 0 contacts imported !!!!
Comment by Gotham — April 7, 2010 @ 9:20 am
Welcome in our house.
Comment by Alcibeades — April 19, 2010 @ 4:40 am
Well I was suspended off of facebook for whatever reason and don't know how to get back on it, they keep saying yahoo suppose to send me a security code to verify my identity and never received an email…please help me.
Comment by lakeshia — June 23, 2010 @ 11:29 am
I have been trying to import neighbors into my farmville and something keeps coming up contact importer error.How can I fix it
Comment by Carol — August 15, 2010 @ 4:26 am
I believe that this service has been declined by Facebook because I tried to make the import from my Yahoo account and it was "out or order"
Comment by Ivan — September 5, 2010 @ 5:35 pm
Has anyone figured out 'how' Yahoo is able to import Facebook contacts/emails without breaking FB policies? Do they have a 'backdoor' with Facebook…that's the only thing I can think off that allows them to do this.
Comment by Jayson — October 5, 2010 @ 12:36 pm
I frankly can't understand why the Yahoo logo comes up every time I log into Facebook. I have Facebook on my toolbar and once I've logged in, the Yahoo logo appears on my account. How frustrating!
Comment by Shelly — January 24, 2011 @ 5:21 am
Nice feature!
Comment by supertellafriend — February 25, 2011 @ 10:14 am
I have integrated this software into my website and it works the same: http://www.super-tell-a-friend.com
Did you try it?
Comment by Alex — March 14, 2011 @ 3:37 am
Yes, I have integrated Super Tell A Friend into my website and yes, it works the same!
Very nice piece of software, I recommend it to all.
Comment by Thomas — July 6, 2011 @ 3:30 am