Earlier this week I had a phone call with a start-up company that was looking to launch a product to the conference industry. It was a service which enabled conference attendees to easily swap contact information. One of the first questions I asked was whether or not you can easily export contacts. I suggested that if I couldn’t export my contacts, the service was not going to succeed.
I found it ironic that I was preaching about contact portability but everyday I interact with Facebook who makes it impossible for me to export my contacts. When I’m writing an email there is no way for me to easily access my contacts’ email addresses and when I make a phone call the only way for me to access my contacts’ phone numbers is through the iPhone Facebook application.
Want to build an application that leverages your Facebook contacts for communication purposes? Unfortunately you can’t unless you are fine with using each individual’s Facebook ID as their unique identifier. What risk does Facebook have from letting users export their contacts? The most obvious risk is the potential for users to take those contacts to a competing service.
In reality though, if a user prefers one social network over another, the ability (or inability) to export from Facebook is not going to be a deal breaker. They are going to register no matter what. So for the love of God Facebook, please let me export my contacts! They are my contacts anyways and I only gave you access to that relationship. You weren’t the person that gave me access to that individual!
LinkedIn continues to grow and they let you export your contacts. Are there any other reasons you can think of that Facebook still locks in our contacts? Why on earth won’t they go ahead and let us export?
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This is useful to know; it tells me that if you, Nick O'Neill, ever ask to add me as a contact on Facebook, I should refuse, because you won't honor the privacy preferences I've asked Facebook to enforce for me. Facebook's anti-export rule isn't just about competition; it's also a privacy-protecting promise to its users.
Comment by James Grimmelmann — September 24, 2008 @ 6:50 am
Interesting thing is the fact that facebook used to allow you to export yur contacts and there info to address book (after some work) but it was disabled shortly after I exported my first wave of contacts.
Comment by paultwo — September 24, 2008 @ 6:54 am
James, You gave me access to your email and phone number when you added me as a friend. I should be able to take that access elsewhere.Best,Nick
Comment by Nick O'Neill — September 24, 2008 @ 6:54 am
LOL. Ok, well that's simple. If you ARENT friends why would you friend invite him anyway?? If you are friends then you shoulnt care if they have your contact info!
Comment by paultwo — September 24, 2008 @ 6:56 am
Nick. Try FriendCSV: http://apps.new.facebook.com/friendcsv/. We built this back in Oct 07 to solve this problem. It doesn't let you export contact information, but does give you the ability to synch it up with your existing gmail address book. Great way to at least "manage" your fb contact list.
Comment by Dan Birdwhistell — September 24, 2008 @ 9:09 am
I believe I tested out an application once called Friend CSV or something like that which allowed me to export a csv file with a ton of friend info… I'll go dig around and see if I can find it. While it is not the best potential way to access your friends' info, it might be a start!
Comment by acafourek — September 24, 2008 @ 10:44 am
Okay, so when I left my comment, I for some reason didnt see the previous one mentioning Friend CSV…but here is the link if anyone is interested: http://www.new.facebook.com/apps/application.ph…..
Comment by acafourek — September 24, 2008 @ 10:47 am
There is a facebook app called facebooksync that will sync your friends contact info and picture to you mac address book. Not sure about one for the PC though…
Comment by jhirbour — September 24, 2008 @ 7:01 pm
loved the post!. but…. at least in my case. most of my contacts on facebook are not of any use… most of them ..old acquaintances and people i have no real connections to now. being able to export them and then adding them to my gmail address book would be of little use… and probably a huge pain in to filter out the ones that ARE important …. and then again… i probably already have them in my address book anyways. ….besides all this…. YEAH FACEBOOK don't be another MICRO$OFT!
Comment by kemeny — September 25, 2008 @ 10:50 am
Facebook must learn that an export feature adds value to the platform leading to more users, not fewer.
Comment by Mike Chelen — October 8, 2008 @ 12:31 pm
Forget about contacts — what about exporting your Notes, your Posted links, your Wall, your Photos, your Videos, and all the attendant comments?
Facebook is becoming a journal for people and their primary means of electronic communication. If and when (mark my words) Facebook goes under or gets bought out by somebody who doesn't care about data retention, there goes your data, which in this case are personal memories.
Facebook lets you *pull* data from tons of sources, RSS feeds, YouTube and Flickr embeds, etc. It needs to allow you to get that data *out* too.
Comment by Darryl — November 5, 2008 @ 11:23 pm
Hi, I am having my own web site, and after completion of registration i want to invite all the friends that are present in my facebook account. Is it possible to do? please help.
Comment by Pallapothu Latha — January 5, 2009 @ 8:20 pm
Mike Chelen said it all. Facebook has amazing functionality. With full capability to interact with the system to plug in to a back-end that manages the data on my end, it would become enormously valuable. At present I can't, for example, export my email correspondence, so I can't pull them into a database that lets me search them easily. The Web social networking interface that's going to win is one that uses the HP OpenView model that allows people to put together back-end functionality that interfaces with the front end to allow professional management of the data in the interface. Programmers will put the functionality into place, and then make it available to others who will find that the interface is significantly more valuable to them as a result.
Comment by Mike — February 3, 2009 @ 8:13 am
It looks like Friend CSV was taken down — anyone have info on one of the other, similar apps?
Comment by MP — June 24, 2009 @ 12:23 pm
Facebook is a draconian bad joke. While you do get into their walled garden you also get dumbed down by their ‘moral’ policies.. lets put it this way: their privacy settings, their commonly exercised ability to lock you out without reason or say, etc are enough to choose other services, or build your own (i.e. Elgg) around open standards technology, and let FB be a child/adult narcissistic playground more than a content/social/business network. From their policy standpoint Facebook was designed to make people depend on them for convenient and verbose relationship access, not to help people operate without or parallel to their service.
Comment by P. Herz — July 9, 2009 @ 2:23 pm
You know how many people request phone #s when they lose there cell phone… it’s stupid that they don’t have an easy way to export that information. At least allow it like once every 3 months.
Comment by Rob Sandie — July 9, 2009 @ 2:27 pm
I love Facebook, but their privacy settings do get kind of annoying at times! I am thinking of making my own social networking site, I just need a name! If anyone has a name, please email me at:
bratboymatthew27 **AT** gmail . com
Sorry about the jumbled up mess of an email address, spam protection
Comment by Matthew Mancuso — August 15, 2009 @ 3:52 am
A technique I discovered is to use Windows Live, which can import contacts from Facebook directly, and then Windows Live can export to CSV which is usable by a lot of different email apps: http://www.waded.org/2009/08/backing-up-contacts-...
Comment by Wade — August 15, 2009 @ 5:46 pm
Just because they are poor should not even bring up the question as to where or not the poor need to be educated. ,
Comment by Faggot40 — October 23, 2009 @ 8:12 am
where do u find your contacts on facebook now
Comment by Phoebe Luckie — February 22, 2010 @ 12:21 am
you can export all you face-book friends e-mails. With the help of yahoo contact tool. For that you have to login in you yahoo account. Then in contact option there is tool button by that you can import all the e-mail ID's from facebook.
Enjoy…
Comment by Ashish Rana — August 27, 2010 @ 4:12 am
I want to export all my friends on facebook to my application which i am building now using wavemaker , I would love to connect facebook to wavemaker, any ideas ??
Comment by Nancy — August 2, 2011 @ 4:40 am