Export Phone Numbers of your Facebook Friends

While there are workarounds that let you easily download all your Facebook data, including email addresses of your Facebook friends, one of the important pieces that you still can’t move out of Facebook is the phone book.

Most of your Facebook friends have put their phone numbers on their profile pages and you’ll love to import them to your mobile phone’s address book but unfortunately Facebook doesn’t offer an option to let you do so.

There’s however a new Chrome extension that be of immense help here.

Called Facebook Friends Exporter, this extension will let you export phone numbers, email addresses (not just the primary address but all the other email addresses as well), IM screen names and website URLs of your Facebook contacts in a standard CSV file that you can quickly import into Outlook, Gmail or any other address book.

Alternatively, you may also choose to import your Facebook friends details directly into Gmail /Google Contacts without even having to use the CSV option.

Here’s a quick video screencast (YouTube) that demonstrates how this thing works:

Once you install the Facebook Friends Exporter extension in Chrome, it will add a new menu option called “Export Friends” to your Facebook.com. Click that link and it will begin parsing the profile pages of all your Facebook friends one-by-one.

It takes about 10 minutes to extract details of 50 friends so you might want to take a break if you are connected with a large number of people on Facebook. Also, Facebook doesn’t like if you visit more than 60 profile pages in under 60 minutes so this extension will automatically pause after that limit is reached and then resumes from where it left off.

This is an open-source extension so you pretty much know what’s happening behind the scenes but it may not play down well with the the Facebook TOS that discourages web scraping – “You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”

The extension is undoubtedly useful and works as advertised but use at your own risk. Also, once details are available in a CSV file, you can import it into Google Contacts and use the the “Find Duplicates” option to merge the similar entries.