Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Get a list of ALL facebook friends and their details.

I have used a number of different applications to get what they claim to be a list of all my facebook friends into a .csv file or a similar format. For some reason, these applications never export all of my friends and the total number of friends listed in the file is always over 100 less than the actual number of friends I have on facebook. How can I properly export the names of ALL my friends and their details?

From web app Oren
  • Unfortunately, any app that does this is shutdown because it's against the FB ToS. FB only allows fluff info like profile pic and general location, not the real info like emails and phone #s.

    This was hotly debated at the beginning of 2008, when Plaxo tried to include this data in Plaxo Pulse.

    Services like FriendCSV have all been shutdown since then.

    Edit in response to the questions: automating retrieval / exporting of details of other Facebook users it against the Facebook Terms of Service.

    Oren : What specifically is not allowed?
    Henri Watson : What specifically isn't allowed is the pulling of Phone Numbers and Email Addresses. There are apps that can do this though, for example AddressBookSync for Mac lets you do this.
    Oren : Is it not possible to get simply a list of names and links to their profile photos?
    From Lloyd Budd
  • If a friend has turned off Facebook Platform entirely (under Account » Privacy Settings » Applications » What you're using) then that friend will not be seen by any Facebook Platform application.

    Your friends can also block specific applications (Account » Privacy Settings » Block Lists » Blocked Applications), and can control whether certain information about them is accessible to any of your applications (Account » Privacy Settings » Applications » Info accessible through your friends).

    Of course you could use a script on your own computer to access the Facebook site as you, and scrape the information from the page, but assuming you don't have permission from Facebook this is against the Facebook Terms of Service:

    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.

    From mark4o

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