Source: “HOW TO: Import Your Facebook Contacts on Google+”
A new Google Chrome extension makes extracting Facebook contacts a lot easier, helping users more easily reconstruct their respective social graphs on Google+.
The extension, called Facebook Friend Exporter, lets you to export details that your Facebook friends have already shared with you, including their names, email addresses, phone numbers, websites, addresses and birthdays. The information can be saved as a CSV file or imported directly into your Gmail address book as a folder labeled “Imported from Facebook.”
A user’s Google+ connections are based upon his or her Gmail address book. To get started, users are encouraged to sift through their Google contacts to add them to “Circles” for friends, family, classmates, co-workers and other custom groups. Circles is Google’s attempt to help users interact better with specific social groups.
But interaction may be the core problem that Google+ faces when going up against social networking heavyweight Facebook. Having users start from scratch isn’t an easy sell, and the Chrome extension doesn’t help with this problem, unfortunately. As the extension doesn’t export a Facebook user’s history — which many users will probably see as a positive, anyway — you won’t find the Facebook stream of photos, videos and status updates on Google+.
CNET reporter Stephen Shankland pointed out that this tool probably won’t rub well with Facebook, citing Section 3.2 of Facebook’s terms of service: “You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”
