I played around with Facebook’s API for a little while today hoping to put together some kind of contact exporter that would allow Facebook friends’ contact info to be exported/synchronized with an address book. Unfortunately, it limits the amount of information you can get access to birthdays, and a few other generic pieces of contact-related information.
That hasn’t stopped other developers from running with the API though and building lots of handy applications. Will Pate has put together a list of some of the best Facebook apps out there. Among my favourites are the Facebook Birthday Calendar Generator, an app that exports your friends’ birthdays in an import-compatible format, and Your True Self, which visually plots your friends across the political spectrum. It’s pretty interesting to see how all this data can be visualized and organized in so many interesting ways.
Facebook Contact Exporter? I don’t have the email addresses of 50 of my Facebook friends. I could go through them one by one, but there ought to be a way to download Contact info – at least some of it. Do you know how?
Flixster-on-Facebook shows I have 20 friends with Flixster accounts, but Flixster.com shows I only have 1 friend on Flixster, because Flixster’s contact checker checked only my Gmail account (it can also check hotmail, yahoo and aol) – it doesn’t seem to have a way to check Facebook. That’s Flixster’s problem more than Facebook’s but it’s still bad that I can’t export data from Facebook. (I would then add their emails to gmail and thus connect with them on flixster, in one automated swoop.) (Flixster’s page in need of facebook is http://www.flixster.com/invite/address-book.)