Search the Facebook Apps directory for something like “export contacts” and you’ll come across quite a few applications that sound as if they can transfer your friends contact information out of Facebook.
There’s an app called “Export Friends” that will save you friends names, city, birthday and their current location in a CSV (text) file that you then import into Excel, Gmail or any other web email program.
Then there are social plug-ins that can sync photos and status updates of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Outlook.
The problem is that none of these apps can download what you are looking – the phone numbers and email addresses of your Facebook friends. There are Greasemonkey scripts and other hacks that can pull this information from Facebook through “web scraping” but don’t ever take that route as Zuckerberg’s army might ban your account forever.
Export Email Addresses of your Facebook Contacts
Facebook APIs don’t expose email addresses of users and hence none of the Facebook apps can provide you with the actual contact data of your friends. There’s however a simple (and perfectly legal) workaround that can help you easily download all your friends email addresses from Facebook’s walled garden.
The trick, as you can see in the video, is actually quite simple.
Go to address.yahoo.com and click the Facebook icon. A login dialog should pop-up, just sign-in with your Facebook credentials and within seconds, you entire Facebook address book will be available inside your Yahoo Mail Account. Once the import is done, click this link to download a CSV file with the email addresses of all your Facebook contacts to your desktop.
You can then import the CSV file into Gmail Contacts, LinkedIn, your phone address book or any of the social sites where you want to connect with your existing Facebook circle.
Update: If Yahoo! is unable to import your Facebook Address book, open your Facebook page and choose “Application Settings” under Account. Next remove the “Yahoo! Contact Importer” application from your Facebook profile and try the steps mentioned in the video again.
Related: How to Download Facebook Photo Albums
Find this article at: http://labnol.org/?p=12970
Reader Comments
Does not work for me, when I click the facebook icon, it just opens the address book and in there I don’t find an option for facebook import any more.
Written by pigeldi on 03.09.10
Hmm, “There was an error authorising your account” in the facebook Yahoo Contact Importer application.
Written by Venkatesh Nandakumar on 03.09.10
Ok, Seems it doesn’t work if you Facebook account is already linked with Yahoo account. First, remove Yahoo as a “Linked Account” from FB, then go-over the whole process again.
Written by Venkatesh Nandakumar on 03.09.10
Wow, this is a great tip. Takes only 2 min max. I can see this as a way for scammers to easily harvest email addresses.
Written by Jack Cola on 03.09.10
This is cool. I was looking for this.
Written by Rajesh Kumar on 03.09.10
is there a way to do this for my phonebook?
Written by James Morrison on 03.09.10
Great tip!!!!
I logged into my unused yahoo account deleted all contacts,
imported contacts from fb.And then exported to csv file.
And again imported csv to my original gmail contacts
Written by Akshay Aurora on 03.09.10
As usual another great tip. I think day by day soon these Facebook Apps might become desktop apps and that would be a real game changer.
Written by Aditya Kane on 03.09.10
LHM
Respected Sir,
Thank you for the tip. I’d imported contacts from all my email accounts into LinkedIn earlier. Your write up takes care of Facebook. Now I’m working on my Twitter contacts. LinkedIn refuses to read the “.CSV” file I saved from Twitter (using Tweetake.com and TwitterExport.com). I’m using the Excel version from year 2003. Am wondering if that’s what’s causing problems.
Written by Jaimon Joseph on 03.10.10
Great tip. Am wondering though if it is possible to do the same for my fans on my company page?
Written by seb on 03.10.10
@venki, @pigeldi – If it doesn’t work for you in the first attempt, just remove the Yahoo Contact application from your Facebook account and try again.
@James – this will only download the email address, the phonebook in Facebook is still not exposed to external apps.
@Jaimon – The apps you mentioned will only download the names of your friends / followers in a CSV file. Twitter API doesn’t allow apps to download the email addresses of their users.
@Seb – Sorry, this only works for normal user profiles and won’t work with Facebook Pages.
Written by Amit on 03.10.10
I was just looking for this..how to export friends..email id from facebook. And I found good article over here..Thanks a lot !
Written by GuruTalks on 03.10.10
I think FB broke this, it is not working for me and I cannot find the Yahoo Contact importer anywhere.
Written by Seth on 03.10.10
It appears that, fortunately, it will only import the friend and their address if that friend has given me permission to see their email address in their privacy settings. It took me a while to find friends who had excluded me from viewing their email address and confirm that they were not imported at all.
This makes me feel better, because I hide my email address in FB from a lot of people and I was worried this would give spammers a work-around access to my email address through a back door.
VERY glad that’s not the case.
Written by Lisa on 03.10.10
This isn’t working for me! It worked on one account that has 60 friends, but another that has over 1000 it keeps saying, “To continue importing your Facebook friends, please keep the dialog window open. If you need to restart or stop the Facebook contact import process, please click on one of the buttons below.”
Is there a limit?!?
Written by Amy on 03.11.10
I found another article on Squidoo for exporting your Facebook contacts. How To Export Facebook Contacts Into a vCard or CSV File.
Written by Lyton on 03.11.10
Is it possible to download the email addresses on a Fan Page?
Written by Matthew on 03.11.10
Excellent – I wonder what other providers have more privileges than your average joe using the API. Would be more awesome if it could grab phone numbers though.
Written by Beau Giles on 03.13.10
Good hack! A lot of people I know use Facebook as their address book, glad to see there is a way to back it up. How did you come across this?
Written by Trevor on 03.13.10