Chrome extension imports Facebook contacts into Google+

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One of the biggest challenges faced by Google’s newest social networking offering, Google +,  is that in order to attract members away from the current King of social media, users must bring all of their contact information into Google +, a potentially time consuming task, especially for those who take pride in their ever growing number of “Facebook Friends”.

facebook friend exporter google

Google has released a Chrome extension named “Facebook Friend Exporter” that will make that process less of a headache by importing all of the contact information shared by one’s Facebook Friends into Google +.   But the extension, created by open source programmer Mohamed Mansour, may be a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service, which state: “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.”

Google and Facebook have been engaged in an ongoing argument since last year about who owns information about a user’s social network connections.  Google maintains that its should be possible to extract contact information from one’s online services, and its Google Takeout does just that for other servcies, but Facebook disagrees, because this means giving up a powerful information to competitors.

Mansour sides with Google in this argument over who owns a user’s contact information, explaining, somewhat defiantly: “I am scraping my own data that my Facebook friends allowed me to use and view. Facebook doesn’t own my friends. I want my friends to be in a place that is easily accessible, extractable, and shareable.  And if that results in a ban, expulsion/termination, so be it.”  Mansour also wrote a program for Chrome that lets one cross post messages from Google +to Facebook and Twitter.

Mansour advises users to use his Facebook Friend Exporter extension at their own risk, because, although no-one has yet been banned from Facebook for using it, that doesn’t mean this won’t happen in the future.