All To The Good

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to update your phone number in Facebook, and have it “automagically” update in all your friends’ phones? Someday we might get there. For now, Facebook has no built-in way to export those phone numbers, and so the numbers we list on Facebook are disjointed from our actual phones. Kind of ridiculous, since your phone is where you’ll need them most. But I’m not about to sit there and copy all the numbers from Facebook into my phone manually.

So I did a little research and exercised my inner-nerd, and found a way to get around the limitations of Facebook, and get those numbers onto on my iPhone. Its a bit of a complex process, but it doesn’t take too long. Here’s how to do it, step by step:

What you’ll need:

• Firefox (web browser)
• Greasemonkey (browser add-on)
• Facebook (if you’re about to keep reading further without a Facebook account, you’re an idiot.)
• Gmail (if you dont have a google account with gmail, get it already… this is 2009 people.)
• iTunes / iPhone (or similar software which can interface gmail with your phone)

What to do:

• If you dont already have the Firefox addon “Greasemonkey” installed, go here & click the “Add to Firefox” button. Click the “Install Now” button. You may have to restart Firefox at this point.
• Step #1:
  In Firefox, browse to: bradfitz.com/greasemonkey/facebook_phonebook_export.user.js

  

  If you have Greasemonkey properly installed, it will ask if you’d like to install the script. Do so (click “Install”). (If you don’t have greasemonkey installed (and enabled), you’ll just get a page that looks like this).

• Step #2:
  Browse to your Facebook Phonebook
• Step #3:
  In the main Firefox toolbar, navigate to: [[ Tools > GreaseMonkey > User Script Commands… > Export Facebook Phonebook ]] & click it. Then click “OK”. You should then see a page that looks like this:

  

  Now click the “Export as vCard” link. Save the file to a place you’ll remember. *Note: you cant try the “Merge into your gmail contacts” link if you’d (and skip step #4), but that method didn’t work for me.

• Step #4:
  At this point we have the information we need, we just have to get it into a format that gmail can make use of. Browse to this page.

  

  Click the “Browse” button & open the file you just saved (addressbooker.vcf). Select the Format as “Gmail (CSV)”. Click the “Convert” button at the bottom. Save the new file.

• Step #5:
  Go to your gmail contacts page. Click “Import” (on the top/right side). Select the file you most recently saved (addressbooker.csv). Now all your Facebook phone numbers will be in your gmail account.
• Step #6:

  This last step is done at your own risk. I say that because it involves syncing. Its been my experience that whenever stuff gets synced, stuff gets screwed. At the very least, it could have some unexpected results. The result for me was that EVERY contact from gmail (whether I had a phone number for them or not) was imported into my iPhone. I then had to go in and delete a lot of the names in my iPhone that I didn’t want there. This being said, it might be a good idea for you to also “clean up” your Gmail contacts a little bit before you go syncing with it. There is an upside… as long as you keep gmail synched in itunes, it won’t add back entries you’ve previously deleted.

  

  Open iTunes & plug in your iPhone. Click on the iPhone (under Devices). Click the “Info” tab. Under the “Contacts” section, select the box that says “Sync contacts with:”, and select “Google Contacts” from the dropdown box. You’ll then enter your gmail account info, and click OK. Sync, and…. You’re Done!

Notes:

There’s probably ways to go about this with other browsers or email programs or phones, but this is what i have, so this is what i did ;.) Much thanks to Brad Fitzpatrick, who wrote the Greasemonkey script. It didn’t work perfectly (causing the necessary vcf to csv file conversion step), but it worked well enough.

Let me know in the comments if this worked for you, or any other method you might have used to get this done!