With the release of Microsoft’s Invite2Messenger, we can now get all our Facebook friends out of Facebook, and into our address books. Useful for finding your friends on other sites, as well as for emailing them!
1. Go to: https://www.invite2messenger.net. If you get a warning about the security certificate, just allow it.
2. Choose Facebook (other sites are to come, including Hotmail, Bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5 and Tagged…)
3. Stick in your email, and click “Find Friends”
4. Once you have the list of all your friends and their emails, select the text on the page, and copy it into a text editor.
5. You now have the information, use find and replace to get it into this form:
name1,emailaddress1
name2,emailaddress2
etc…
6. To import into gmail, make the first line of the file:
Name,E-mail
and save the file as a .csv.
7. Go to gmail, then choose contacts. Choose import at the bottom of the page, and choose your file. Gmail automatically checks for duplicates before it adds the new addresses, and merges them when there are duplicates.
For other email providers, check their help on the file format needed. Gmail can export in some different formats, so perhaps it’s a good idea to put it through Gmail to get the others.
8. Go to twitter, last.fm, digg, friendfeed etc etc and use their friend finders to find out which of your friends are on those sites!
Hope this is helpful!
Much easier than trying to screenscrape the page…
