6 ms·
Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends: Chrome extension exports Facebook contacts
- wibblenut 16y agoI'm trying to get all of my friends to use .tel domains. That way they own their data and I can discover all of their URIs dynamically (through DNS) from various apps. It doubles up as a web based "business card", which makes it a slightly easier sell.
- JeremyBanks 16y agoWhy .tel, rather than a more common TLD?
- mgcross 16y agoI was curious too; from wikipedia: "In contrast to other top-level domains .tel information is stored directly within the Domain Name System (DNS), within the actual domain name record, as opposed to the DNS simply returning details (such as IP addresses) of the machines on which information can be found." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel
- wibblenut 16y agoBecause .tel was approved specifically (and solely) for this purpose :) Here's Telnic's quick 5 minute pitch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnRwniqqiCE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnRwniqqiCE
- siculars 16y agoThis just seems ripe for dns injection tomfoolery.
- wibblenut 16y agoJust like everything else, hence DNSSEC.
- stoney 16y agoThis looks very handy - hadn't heard of it before. Apparently it can also be used as an OpenID. Do you know of a list of services that actually make use of these domains?
- wibblenut 16y agoYup. Some apps/services are listed here: http://www.telnic.org/tools-landing.html http://www.telnic.org/tools-landing.html and http://www.telnic.org/tools-other.html http://www.telnic.org/tools-other.html I've written some stuff that I'll try and release soon.
- mjs 16y agoHow does the privacy features (i.e. restricting access to certain information to certain people) work if the information is embedded in DNS? (Also, how can you use "dig" or similar to extract the information from a *.tel address? Everything I try seems to return the same sort of information I'd get from any other domain.)
- wibblenut 16y agoPrivacy is achieved by encrypting records (1024-bit RSA, PKCS#1.5) and storing them using a sub-domain label known only to the counterpart (your friend). Keys are brokered by a service called TelFriends, and this is the only element of the system that's centralised. However, you only ever use it to make new friends, as your client is supposed to cache keys. Of course, all of this complexity is hidden behind a pretty interface, so users don't have to worry :) As for the dig command, perhaps your resolver (DSL router?) is buggy? Try Google's: $ dig @8.8.8.8 andy.tel naptr (or 'txt' for my text records, and 'loc' for my location). Hit me up on http://messaging.andy.tel http://messaging.andy.tel if you want to chat about anything in more detail.
- daniel_iversen 16y agoAnd how much do you want to bet that the developer og this plugin works for Google ;) .... let the mud slinging begin ;)
- mattsidesinger 16y agoI thought you could export all of your Facebook friends email addresses using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail I opened a new Yahoo Mail account last week and did this...did they remove it? I thought that there was a big uproar because Gmail users were not able to do this so Google blocked Facebook from exporting Gmail contacts. Regardless, this sounds like a great extension and you should not have to open a mail account with Yahoo or MS to export your friends. This is an excellent idea!
- maggie 16y agoYup, you can do that! I had a friend create a pipe where he synced his fB to Yahoo, and then Yahoo to Gmail to put his contacts in Gmail... I was contemplating writing a Firefox (or Chrome) extension where you input your Yahoo / Google / Facebook account info. and the extension goes off and does the piping for you. But! this looks awesome, need to go test (by reactivating my fB account...)
- joe_the_user 16y agoYes but that's only because Yahoo and MS have a deal with Facebook and you don't know how long it will last. Facebook was explicit in their reply to Google that they feel they can block people exporting their friend's emails. Friend emails are exported by the "export tool" - in fact, you get but a list of names from that. I would be very interested in looking at the code and noting people's experience with this. One writer was kicked off Facebook for exporting his address two years ago.
- asmosoinio 16y agoI wanted to test this, but never found a way to activate it... How do you activate this? There is no "how to" text on the project page either (or I didn't find it).
- keryor 16y agoThere should be a red link in the top right corner of your facebook page that says "Export friends!" (right to the left of the "Home" link). Once you click that, just follow the accompanying instructions and it should work - although be warned it takes a long time, especially if you're doing it for a lot of "Friends".
- jp_sc 16y agoIt only works when Facebook is in english
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- lewi 16y agoThis is gold! Facebook is gonna get so angry. I wonder what their next move will be.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- antimatter15 16y agoFound this http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-exporter.js#238 http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-... if (request.pissOffZuckerberg) { startExportFriendData(); }
- diogomonica 16y agoI get a Forbidden when trying to access this!
- quadhome 16y agoI felt the same way about my Facebook messages. Before they released the archive tool, I wrote this: http://fb.quadhome.com/ http://fb.quadhome.com/ I wonder if, since the Chrome extension is Javascript, it could be injected into a bookmarklet and made to run on anyone's browser...
- antimatter15 16y agoThe Chrome extension looks like it includes more than just the exporting code, which does look like something that could be fairly trivially made into a bookmarklet. http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-exporter.js http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-... But it also has the ability to automagically use OAuth to connect with gmail to upload contact information.
- nikcub 16y agosomebody needs to get the facebook mobile apps and reverse engineer them to figure out how their own apps are able to extract all friend contact info (email, phone #s) mimicking an official client would be a lot better than this extension which relies on facebook leech detection not noticing the requests and banning you
- joe_the_user 16y agoFinding the official mobile seems like a moving target as Facebook's API is constantly changing. This is latest QT thing I can find: http://gitorious.org/qfacebook http://gitorious.org/qfacebook (supersedes Google's port of an iphone library). But access might depend more on permissions than the library. Information on this would be GOOD to have.
- timinman 16y agoAwwwsOoOoOome!
- davidmat 16y agoOr... you can just link up facebook with your old Yahoo mail address.(the one from the 90s you still keep around and check every 6 months or so ;) This lets you import your facebook contacts in your yahoo address book, so you can export them as csv later.
- kacy 16y ago^^ What he said. I did this, and it exported my 800+ contacts in less than a minute. Then I imported them to Address Book for Mac and used AddressBookSync (http://danauclair.com/addressbooksync/ http://danauclair.com/addressbooksync/) to grab the facebook profile pictures and add them to each contact.
- itiztv 16y agotnx
- mick_schroeder 16y agowhy not add the ability to get phone numbers too?
- blntechie 16y agoThere is a Sony Ericsson application in Facebook which retrieves all your friends' phone numbers and upload it to their servers which then can be synced with any Sony Ericsson phone . Then I can download it as CSV by connecting the phone to the PC. A round about way but it works. So I guess there might be other apps which does this.
- araneae 16y agoYeah, for me this would be one of the more important features, since I've on more than one occasion had to access FB to get a phone number.
- w1ntermute 16y agoI would highly recommend against using this tool, as it is against Facebook's Terms of Service. Robert Scoble was kicked off Facebook in January 2008 for pulling a stunt exactly like this (http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-facebook/ http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-face...). While his fame and contacts allowed him to get his account reinstated in short order, many of us might not be so fortunate.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- wladimir 16y agoWell, if you intend to leave facebook anyway and want a dump of your frendlist to invite them to some other, more open social networking system, it doesn't matter that you get banned does it?
- A1kmm 16y agoI guess the key would be to ensure it is sufficiently slow to avoid triggering the anti-bot mechanism. Browsing the code I found this: http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-exporter.js#115 http://code.google.com/p/fb-exporter/source/browse/trunk/fb-... ... idx * 11000 + Math.random() * 1000 So in other words, it downloads the ith friend at time 11*i +/- 1s; an average of one download every 11.5s might just be sufficiently slow to avoid getting banned from Facebook. Obviously, Facebook could look for patterns in their logs that look like the tool (too high a ratio of friend data downloads to other pages, for example, or an unnaturally high goodness of fit to 11s plus uniform variation), but it would probably be quite expensive for them to make such searches too complex, and if an arms race between the autoblockers and the downloaders ensued, the downloaders would have the upper hand because Facebook has the disadvantages of needing to avoid false positives and to deal with the large amount of data they would need to process to do any complex statistical analysis across all access requests. A few sources cite the median number of Facebook friends at 150 - so even at the relatively slow rate of one friend data download a minute (perhaps with some intervening decoy requests), half of all Facebook users could download all friend data in 2.5 hours. A non-bot user could easily hit Facebook at that rate, and Facebook would get very bad PR if they started banning a significant proportion of their user base due to false positives.
- blhack 16y agoedit: I mis-spoke. You'd need to request the email address from each user individually. Okay, I admit, that is kindof sucky. That said, I completely understand this move. My guess is that this is to prevent "farmville" from dumping a list of all of my friends' emails, and then spamming them. Isn't this all available via the Open Graph API? (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web#personalization http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web#personalizati...) Edit: Yes, it absolutely is: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api About halfway down the page, click the link after the word "friends" for a JSON of your friends and their UIDs. Fetch this and iterate through the IDS for basic info. Fetch this url: https://graph.facebook.com/$facebook_uid https://graph.facebook.com/$facebook_uid here is my info: https://graph.facebook.com/ryanseamus https://graph.facebook.com/ryanseamus
- natrius 16y agoEmail addresses aren't in there. When I look at my own info, I see a @proxymail.facebook.com email address, which is presumably what an app would use to email me. It's not what you'd want for exporting contact info.
- joe_the_user 16y agoyes: "Getting an access token for a user with no extended permissions allows you to access the information that the user has made available to everyone on Facebook. If you need specific information about a user, like their email address or work history, you must ask for the specific extended permissions. "
- natrius 16y agoYou can only get information about one user at a time that way. Exporting the data can't be done. If you disagree, write the code.
- n-named 16y agoWhy does this need access to my browsing history? :(
- Groxx 16y agoIt's a bit of an alarmist, though accurate, alert: anything which has access to your tabs (ie, anything which can observe / inject into a page) also has access to your "history" as it can see what you're browsing. I'm sure other permissions also trip this, but "tabs" is one of the most common, and I ran across it recently too: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tabs.html http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tabs.html edit: I'd assume "history" also trips the history alert: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/history.html http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/history.html edit again: the extension has "tabs" permission only. Very little to worry about, unless you're paranoid about your browsing history.
- chrischen 16y agoIf you are paranoid, use incognito. Extensions are disabled in incognito mode by default.
- cfinke 16y agoI wrote a similar tool two years ago: http://www.chrisfinke.com/2008/01/03/take-your-facebook-data-with-you/ http://www.chrisfinke.com/2008/01/03/take-your-facebook-data... If my experience is any indication, the author will be receiving a takedown notice shortly.
- A1kmm 16y agoThey don't, however, seem to mention their names anywhere. If Facebook knows the name of the author, they can threaten to ban them from Facebook if they don't take it down (about the only leverage they have to exploit). However, to get a real name, they would need to get Google to reveal an IP address, and then the user's ISP to reveal account details - hardly a simple process. Google isn't going to hand over the IP of the authors, so they would need to file a (probably baseless) lawsuit and try to subpoena the names - something Google is likely to fight since the software is in their interests too.
- bbk 16y agoThere was a article on this on techcrunch. [Techcrunch blocked at work. Cant post the link now]. tl;dr for the TC post: 1.Create a dummy yahoo email id. 2.Import friends from facebook. 3. Export contacts as csv. 4. Import in Gmail.
- wiks 16y agoHell Ya!!!!
- quizbiz 16y agoTalk about hacker news... no?
- kdeldycke 16y agoLooks like the project was just deleted from Google Code. I always get a "403 Forbidden" page each time I try to access the project page. Fortunately, the binary extension is still downloadable at this URL: fb-exporter.googlecode.com/files/fb-exporter.crx
- gst 16y agoI just wanted to post exactly the same. I also get a "forbidden" error here.
- diogomonica 16y agoNot even the binary extension is available anymore. 403!
- kdeldycke 16y agoSource code has a better value than the binary: I'm sure Facebook will deploy some counter-measures pretty soon, making the binary unusable. Nobody's got the source code ? I tried to checked it out but I get 403's again...
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoCan't you just use the downloader and download all your data? Edit: go to https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php and then click the "learn more" link, then download. I think they email you when the download is compiled.
- jamesaguilar 16y agoDoesn't include email addresses, which is what this whole kerfluffle is about.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoAh, OK, thanks for the elucidation.
- castis 16y agoHas this tool been taken down?
- cvander 16y agoForbidden Your client does not have permission to get URL /p/fb-exporter/ from this server.
- ivan_ah 16y agoApparently the extension made it to the "open sea" of torrents ;) http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/255130489/fb-exporter?tab=summary http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/255130489/fb-exporter?tab... I have been waiting for this extension for soooo long. I can finally quit! hashes of file fb-exporter.crx: MD5 d2ae04feae8df535025e572a8030a3ee sha1 ccc0a1213b6427cb019b36dbfacdc7770c6bec23
- socialgrapher 16y agoThe recently launched OSS project https://sourceforge.net/projects/themycubevault/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/themycubevault/ is looking for plugin developers to do exactly this kind of data export. I will try and port the JS extension to run there instead.
- forkrulassail 16y agoWhat happened to this tool?