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Export your Facebook phonebook (legal and working) (brad.livejournal.com)
15 points by flavio87 on Dec 13, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments


Awesome. And regardless of whether this is "legal" according to FB's TOS, I'm incredulous if you think it's anything but perfectly ethical to copy the phone numbers of your friends to your own computer.


Thought this might be useful: If you're exporting to vCards and importing to your address book, and want to retain first/middle/last name so you can merge w/existing contacts, here's a regexp (for Textmate).

Find: FN:(\S+) ((\S+( \S+)?) )?(\S+) Replace: N:(?2:$5;$1;$3;;:$5;$1;;;)\n$0

N:Smith;John;J.;; FN:John J. Smith


This has been done before: http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-scavenger/ and was shut down by Facebook

Facebook Scavenger was a Firefox extension that allowed you to export your friends' contact info, including e-mail addresses; Facebook will most certainly send Brad a takedown notice as well.


Why do we think it is "legal"?

Brad says "Use at your own risk, then." and "... it'd be a little hard to fingerprint."

Neither of which scream "legal" at all. In fact, rather the opposite.


I admit to being a bit suspicious of something that needs to preface itself as "legal".




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