AddressBooker & exporting my Facebook Phonebook

[brad]

This 4-day weekend was awesome for catching up on personal hacking projects. In addition to adding IPv6 support to Perlbal and hacking on my interactive shadow/art wall more, I also worked on a little address book management tool, AddressBooker [source hereBasically AddressBooker takes a POST of contacts data in JSON form, and does stuff with it,

Comments

[brad]

Done! (modified a bit)

Seems to work with OS X. Thanks!

Guess this won't get the email address?

[marcusramberg]

Seeing as it's presented as a picture in facebook.

[dan_lane]

Isn't this against the Facebook terms of service? There was a very useful Mac Address Book sync tool but it was shutdown because exporting contact details from Facebook is, apparently, against their TOS :(

Didn't Plaxo get a few users in trouble when they launched their Facebook sync tool as well?

[brad]

Isn't this against the Facebook terms of service?

I don't know.

There was a very useful Mac Address Book sync tool but it was shutdown because exporting contact details from Facebook is, apparently, against their TOS :(

Well, this isn't a Facebook App, so not sure what would be shut down.

Didn't Plaxo get a few users in trouble when they launched their Facebook sync tool as well?

That tool slammed the hell out of Facebok's servers, so people using it (Scoble) had their accounts suspended for rate limit abuses. The Greasemonkey script I wrote does just a couple HTTP requests (one per 50 friends w/ phone numbers), spaced ~1 second apart... very human-speed.

[bewlay_brother]

Facebook's problem with Plaxo wasn't that they were aggressively accessing pages, it was that they were harvesting Facebook user info for their own purposes.

An address book exporting is more benign - it's not a competitive threat, for example - but it still violates the spirit of Facebook's ToS, which is to guarantee that every user has full control over their data at all times.

[davidglasser]

Oh, man, I wanted this just last week.

Hmm, does it do any sort of search-and-merge with the Google contacts, or does it always create new ones?

[obra]

It did some search-and-merge for me.

[davidglasser]

Apparently I have too many Google contacts already:

Traceback (most recent call last

[brad]

I was worried about that. Frustrating App Engine limits.

Okay, I'll have to fix that next time I get some free time.

[obra]

This rocks. You rock.

[brad]

So I assume it worked for you, no issues?

Keep up the good work on K-9 Mail, btw. I use it and love it.