Convert your Facebook friend contacts to CSV | Hacker News Reader

Convert your Facebook friend contacts to CSV

vytautas.jakutis.name

28 pointstahu17 comments

Weird, I've decided to leave FB and was working on doing this an hour ago. I ended up using: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ficlccidpkaiepnnbo...

You can also use this method: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/how-to-mass-export-all-of-y...

but for me it only exported contacts that had their email address visible. "Facebook Friend Exporter" worked better.

Hey, the language that gets the job done is the proper one.

wtf.. Why screen scrape Facebook from a bookmarklet, when the Graph API gives you all this and more in JSON.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/

you cant have all that informations via the Graph API I think. For example the birthday dates of my friends, I cant have them via the API

Yeah, you can. You can get alot out of the Graph API.

  https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?fields=birthday&access_token=[...]

oops, ok my bad! Thank you :)

what's really missing is the phone numbers.

Graph API does not expose phone numbers

I think this is where fbcmd [ http://fbcmd.dtompkins.com/ ] enters. It can do some fancy things scraping has trouble doing. I extracted tel numbers and other info from friends in tidy CSV, downloaded all the photos I was in and more.

I just had to do the very same thing, except instead of Facebook, it was a contact list in a proprietary medical office database. Since my programming skills are limited to Basic and Pascal, I just used AutoHotKey and the AutoHotKey Recorder. After a little editing, i.e. adding a test for empty boxes and putting the whole script in a loop, it was working fine. I considered teaching myself Ruby, but I knew it would be much faster to use AutoHotKey. But it's really interesting to see the same process in a proper computer language

Just be careful, Facebook monitors for scraping activity and has deleted accounts over this in the past.

Would be great if it offered a variable sleep option, to make it a bit less of a dead giveaway.

I used http://www.cleanmywall.net/ which was scrapping for over 12h, also used https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ficlccidpkaiepnnbo... to export my friends and luckily I wasn't banned. I wonder what are the criteria to get banned for scrapping.

The code is updated - now randomizing the order and time in which contacts are polled.

Everyone quick! Get it, before the cease and desist letter comes. ( backup: http://piratepad.net/VKHtw0Txli )

The letter might hit some complications since the site is outside of US.

After browsing the source I thought there has to be a better way

Cool stuff. Got a lot of insight from the code.

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