If you haven’t been keeping up with the happenings of the intreweb over the past few days, then you probably haven’t noticed the little dispute between Facebook and Google about sharing email information across platforms. I mention this before walking through the steps of how to get your Facebook friend’s email addresses into your Address Book app on your Mac, because without this disagreement I wouldn’t have been lucky enough to come across the initial steps that showed me exactly how to do it.
In a quick summary, earlier this week Google decided to stop letting Facebook easily import an individuals email addresses and contacts when first creating a Facebook account. Google didn’t think it was fair to provide Facebook email addresses when Facebook wouldn’t let Google, and almost any other company, export contact information like email address from Facebook. Facebook responded by exploiting a work around and stating something along the lines of “your friend’s email addresses aren’t yours so you can’t export them from Facebook”…
Techcrunch.com then clearly showed everyone that this isn’t the case if you’re Yahoo or Microsoft (remember Microsoft is using Facebook information for better search results with Bing) and Yahoo contact’s includes the ability to import contacts from Facebook. And that’s how we’ll get our Facebook contact information into Address Book.
Import Facebook Friend’s Email into Address Book
To import all of your Facebook Friend’s email addresses into Address Book you’re going to need the help of Yahoo. If you don’t already have an account, you’ll need to create an email account with Yahoo.
After you’ve created an account with Yahoo it will ask you if you want to bring in contacts from other apps like Gmail, Windows Live, and Facebook. Yep, Facebook will let you export all your friends email addresses to Yahoo, but allowing Google to do so would be a problem. So, we’ll take advantage of Yahoo and import our Facebook Friend’s email addresses to Yahoo Contacts.
Click the Facebook icon, enter your Facebook account information, and keep your fingers crossed. When I first tried this in Safari Yahoo returned and told me that I had successfully imported 0 friends. While I’m not as social as I once was, I knew I had at least 1 friend and figured I’d give the same process a try with Firefox. After trying to import contacts with Yahoo again (You can do this when logged in to Yahoo Mail by clicking Contacts >> Tools >> Import >> Facebook) but on Firefox I didn’t have any better luck. My final attempt with Google Chrome was a success and I was able to successfully import to Yahoo Contacts over 200 of my friend’s email addresses. I’m not sure why one browser worked and the other didn’t but some people say signing in and out of Facebook Chat helps this process work properly.
Now that I was able get my contacts into Yahoo Contacts I was just a few clicks away from having them in Address Book on my Mac, where I could sync them to my iPhone and have my Facebook Friend’s email addresses on my iPhone everywhere I went. In Yahoo Contacts select Tools and then Export.
When prompted select to export select to export the VCF files and save the zip file to your Mac. Extract the Zip file and then Open Address Book.
With Address Book open, things get easy. Select all the VCF file from the Yahoo Contacts export that you just pulled down to your computer and drag and drop them into Address book. If duplicate entries exist, Address Book will prompt you to determine if you want to select one and remove the other or merge the entries. Manage your contacts as you see fit and enjoy your Facebook Friend’s email addresses on your Mac in Address Book and then through syncing to your iPhone.
