Technology

Moving the Email Addresses of Your Facebook Friends to Gmail

By Nicholas Jackson

Q: I'd like to be able to email all of my Facebook friends at once from my regular Gmail account. Is there a way to make this possible?

GmailLogo.jpgA: Google and Facebook are in the middle of a fight over content sharing and it's only hurting us, the users who are without a dog on either team. But no bother, there are simple hacks for moving content from one platform to the other, whether Facebook and Google want you to know about them or not.

Have you ever wanted to reach out to all -- or even just a chunk -- of your Facebook friends off of the social networking site? There's an easy way to move all of your Facebook contacts and their email addresses into your Gmail contacts list or any other address book that you might use.

First, visit Yahoo's "Import Contacts" page. You'll have to sign up for a (free) Yahoo account if you don't already have one. And it might be best to sign up for a new account even if you already have one so that you avoid messing up any contacts list you've already tinkered with. In another tab or window, open your Facebook account, sign in and, according to DownloadSquad and Geekosystem, two other sites that have put together similar how-tos, you should also turn on your Facebook chat. Once you're logged on to both sites, click the Facebook icon on Yahoo's "Import Contacts" page and, when asked if you want to share your contacts with Yahoo, accept.

After all of your contacts are successfully imported and you're shown a "Congratulations!" screen, click on "View imported contacts." Select "Export" from the "Tools" menu at the top of the Yahoo contacts page. A new window will provide a variety of options for exporting your contacts: to Microsoft Outlook, to Netscape/Thunderbird, to Yahoo CSV, to vCard Single File (for Palm Desktop users), or to vCard Zip or .VCF files. If you want to export your contacts to Google, select the Outlook option. To Apple's Address Book, select the individual vCard option.

Visit your Gmail page and choose "Contacts" from the left-hand sidebar. From this page, select "Import" from the "More actions" menu and browse for the file you just saved. The email addresses of all of your Facebook contacts should now be saved in your Gmail contacts list.

Tools mentioned in this entry:

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