Synchronizing Facebook & Gmail

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OK I won’t get on my open source soap box too much but this is yet another example of what open source allows us to do (innovate)!  Brad Fitzpatrick has a great post over on his site about enabling manual synchronization of your contacts between Facebook and Gmail.  It basically looks at all of your friend’s contact information within Facebook and then compares that information to what you have in Gmail and synchronizes it for you in just a few easy clicks.  The good news is you have to use Firefox so you can’t use Internet Explorer you Microsoft lovers you!  The other prerequisite is you need to have the Greasemonkey extension installed within Firefox in order for it to work (try doing this with proprietary software).  OK so once you have Firefox and Greasemonkey installed (Firefox restart required), click the link below from Brad’s site and GreaseMonkey should ask you to automatically install it.

http://bradfitz.com/greasemonkey/facebook_phonebook_export.user.js

Follow the instructions and then go to your Facebook Phonebook.  Then within Firefox click Tools > GreaseMonkey > User Script Commands… > and you’ll see Export Facebook Phonebook (you have to be on the Facebook Phonebook page in order for it to not be grayed out…took me a while to figure that out). That will then page through your phone book (you should probably start on page 1: it’s kinda flaky) and extract the data, and then POST it to AddressBooker for you, which will then guide you through merging it into your Google Contacts.  Be sure to thank Brad for his time over at his site via this link if you found this helpful (I did).