Facebook blocks tool “exporting” friends to Google+

July 5, 2011 - 14:28 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Facebook has been blocking a tool to let people extract contact information their friends have shared with them, the tool's developer said - but he's working on a way to evade Facebook's restrictions, CNET reported.

"Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove e-mails of your friends from your profile by today July 5, 2011. It will no longer work for many people," warned Mohamed Mansour, developer of the Facebook Friend Exporter, against a Chrome extension that automates the data-extraction process.

The tool lets people save their contacts' e-mail addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, and other information into a text file or to directly import them into Gmail. That makes it much easier for Google account holders to rebuild their contact network at Google+, Google's brand-new social network site.

The activities surrounding the export tool spotlights the value of the data contained in social networks. Google believes people should be able to extract information about their contacts and provides tools to let people do so. Facebook, the incumbent power in social networking, provides only a tool to let people extract what they themselves have put into the network.

Facebook's actions to block the extension apparently were effective. Many users of the Facebook Friend Exporter tool reported that it didn't work, producing only names and the address of their Facebook pages, but not the e-mail address. In addition, Facebook earlier had begun showing addresses as graphics, not text that was easily detected, processed, and copied; Mansour got around this obstacle by extracting the information through the mobile version of Facebook's site.