How to export your Facebook contacts to your mobile phone
January 26, 2008My phone application can import as a .vcf file, or type them in manually, but what if you want all your contacts phone numbers on your phone at once? Here is the answer:
1. Install the mobile application and go to: http://www.facebook.com/mobile/?phonebook and select all the contacts and numbers
and copy and paste them into a text file.
2. Now format your entries: delete the letters A,B,C,…Z, and delete the appending M and L letters on the end of the phone numbers.
3. By now you should have a list of contacts with a line containing the name, and the line below containing a number, or two numbers if a contact added a landline as well as a phone number.
4. Press delete and space at the end of each name, to get each line into the format: firstname, lastname, mobile number, landline number.
5. save and close the file as .txt, and reopen in wordpad. press control and h, and replace the spaces with a comma.
6. Add the following line at the top of the file: First name, Last Name, Cell, Phone (Home),
7. Go to this website, it is a CSV to vCard converter: http://homepage.mac.com/phrogz/CSV2vCard_v2.html
8. Select all and paste the data into the box.
9. Goto step 2, check that the types are correctly selected.
10. Goto step 3, and copy and paste the data into notepad and save as a .vcf file.
11. Download the .vcf file to your phone, either by USB cable, bluetooth, etc..
You now saved typing your phone contacts in manually!
Note that facebook does not allow an application to be made which does the exporting for you, for security reasons I guess.
April 29, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Gah, I hate this - why DOESN’T Facebook allow you to export this data? Can’t they just specify a privacy option in your profile that says, “Do not allow export of my number.” so that people who don’t want to be imported can be excluded by default?
April 29, 2008 at 11:30 pm
yes that would be a useful option, and yes i am hating it as much as you. well, at least you only have to do it once in a blue moon. i bet it would be possible to write a program to do all the manual stuff for you.
if u add the mobile application and click on phonebook u can see all of the mobile numbers anyway, so why would they make it difficult to do the next logical step of being able to send the contacts to your own phone, either via a text or a vcf file? i mean what is the use of phone number if u have to add each one manually? Something worth asking/suggesting to FB?? Would certainly get rid of all the stupid “lost my phone number” groups!