How to Export Contacts from Facebook

Please Note: This post is almost two years old! In internet times, it's ancient, and thus, outdated. You may find newer links at this link : [Google Search]

TechCrunch had an article earlier this week, complaining how Facebook denies access to our friends' email addresses. Its true of course, and even its recently debuted tool to download information off the site doesn't include email addresses. (To use the tool, go to FB Account Settings and click the 'learn more' link next to 'Download your Information'.) Without email addresses, the friends list cannot be imported into other sites, which means FB is making it hard for its users to move to a different site, taking their friends list with them.

FB claims to be protecting our friends' privacy, but they actually have deals with Yahoo! and Microsoft to share exactly that so-called 'private information' with them! Talk about hypocrisy!

As a follow-up, TC is suggesting that we can use the FB deal with Yahoo! to our advantage, by

1. Creating a new Yahoo! Mail account,
2. Importing our FB friends' email addresses data on to Yahoo! mail,
3. Exporting that as a CSV file, and then
4. Importing the CSV into Gmail or Outlook or wherever.

Sneaky, yes, and its a middle finger to Facebook's so-called commitment to protecting users' privacy, but I think step one can be skipped.

Sign-in to your Y!Mail account - Yeah, I know, you've probably not used that crap for a while since getting addicted to the awesomeness of Gmail.. but at least its good for tricks like this!

Now, click this link: Import Contacts to Yahoo!

There you can import contacts from FB, Gmail or Windows Live to your Y! account.

Update: Looks like Amith Agarval's Digital Inspiration blog had explained this trick back in March! Totally unrelated, I swear! :)

Update 2: (Related) How to transfer your Facebook contacts to Google Plus!

Doing Your bit to reduce Spam - Using BCC

In 2001, spam accounted for an estimated 5% of our email. In 2007, it clogs our inboxes* to the tune of 90-95% of all email sent, according to a new report released recently by Barracuda Networks. Barracuda, a leading vendor of spam filtering technology, based their analysis on the over 1 billion emails that the company's software scans each day.

Spammers need email IDs to send the spam to, and there are many sneaky sites out there who collect addresses from visitors and sell them to the spammers. Email addresses are also collected by spambots, which crawl the web just like regular search engine crawlers (like Google's Googlebot) , but looking for email IDs in webpages (say, in comments) instead of keywords.

Another source of valid email addresses are, believe it or not, your own forwarded emails. Whether sending jokes, amaaaaaazing pictures, inspiring presentations, friendship quotes or, the worst of them all - Chain Mails, the way you send it could very well be helping spammers send more unwanted messages to your own friends, relatives & colleagues...

As I mentioned in the last post, when you put all the addresses in the 'to' or 'cc' boxes while forwarding an email, the email IDs of all the recipients are visible to each other!. The actual use of 'cc' is for intimating persons other than those whom the message is meant for about the email. For example, you want to let Archie know that you have sent the mail to Jughead, while the letter isn't actually meant for Archie himself. If you didn't want Jughead to know that, then you'd put Archie's email ID into the 'BCC' box instead. Since email IDs in 'BCC' aren't visible to any of the recipients, the addresses remain safely within your contact list, away from prying eyes.

Another responsible thing you can do is to clean up the mail being forwarded before sending it across - remove the huge list of previous forwarders & forwardees from the mail. That isn't what you want your friends to read, right? You want them to see the contents of the mail itself. I have seen forwards with three to four PAGES of

"Forwarded Message: Fwd:Fw:Fwd: Subject
From: xx32, To: yy1, yy2..... yy56, yy 57...
---------
Forwarded Message: Subject
From: zz20, To: xx1, xx2, xx3.... xx71
...
.....
...
......."

... followed by a One-Liner Joke. What gives?!

Once I even got a mail with just the list; no content - it had been clipped due to the mail being too long.. ( In Gmail, you can view the full content through the 'Show Original' link in the Reply button drop-down. )

Same thing with the Subject line as well - whatz with the 'Fwd: Fw: Re: [Groupkkk] Fwd [MailingList DingDong]....' ?? In Gmail, you should just click 'Edit Subject' link, clean it up so that just one 'Fwd:' & the Subject itself remains before sending it.

---

Inspired by a post at Yahoo! Mail's blog, where they explain the use of BCC through a screencast. The video itself isn't that impressive, so I'll just link to it rather than embed it here in the blog. > Using BCC Feature (Yahoo! Video)

* The part about 'Clogging your Inboxes' assumes that you aren't using Gmail :D

Its now easier to locate your Gmail contacts in Orkut. But...

Orkut has just announced the ability to check whether people in your Gmail Address book are already in your orkut friends list. If they aren't, you are given the option to either add them (if they are already orkut members) or invite them to orkut.

Original Post : orkut Blog: I'm feeling serendipitous!

This would've worked out better, If only Gmail didn't add each and every contact you ever emailed - even just for once - to your address book! When I tried out the feature, I had to spend hours cleaning up my Gmail address book. Why? The sequence of mistakes are as follows:

1. A friend of mine gets a forward. He is compelled by the warning in the email to send it to all his contacts, because otherwise, he could die within a few hours!! (Have been receiving mails which ask you to forward them? They are called 'Chain Mails' - click here if you have a minute to spare.)
   
   
2. He puts his entire address book into the 'To' field when sending the forward. By doing so, he has just exposed all the email addresses in his contact list to the entire world - even company emails, private addresses which other people trusted him with.. each and every one. If only he had put them in the 'bcc' field - the email ids of his contacts would've remained hidden from all recipients.
   
   
3. When I got the email, I couldn't resist telling him the errors of his ways, so I told him the stuff I just explained in the last two steps through the 'Reply' button - but alas! I had used the 'Reply to all' button instead; my advice is now being sent to more than a hundred people - my friend's entire address book..
   
   
4. The last mistake wouldn't have been so bad as it was, if it wasn't for the Gmail feature I mentioned at first - all of the addresses which I (accidentally) just sent the email to were now in my address book as well! People I don't even know, haven't even heard of - were now in my Address book. Great. Just Great.

So when I tried to use the new orkut feature, many of those contacts appeared in the list of prospective orkutians who aren't already in my friends list. Suffice to say, hours had to be spent cleaning up my address book before I could bring down the number to below 100.

One of the features I really wish Gmail had is the ability to combine contacts - I don't want to manually merge multiple entries into single contacts. But since I had to, I've already done that - just took me about three days... :(

I've also noticed another mistake some orkutians are making. They have multiple email addresses, like most of us do, say, tom@gmail.com & tom@yahoo.com. Lets say Tom created his orkut account using the gmail id (It was possible with any email id until Google integrated orkut into the Google Account). So when a friend searches for Tom with his yahoo ID, they may not find him.. Tom thinks, "Oh no! I don't want to keep my friends from finding me!"

So Tom figures out a workaround - he makes a dummy profile in orkut with his yahoo ID, and adds himself as a friend to that profile. Now when anyone searches for him in orkut with his yahoo id, they'll come to this profile, notices his real profile in the friends list, and sends the friend request to that profile instead. Simple, right?

No, its not, and there are two reasons: One, when we search for an email id in orkut, and if a profile with that address already exists, the orkut interface just gives us the option to add the friend; it doesn't show us the friends list of that profile. So, your friend won't even know that it was just a dummy profile. And Two, you could just add the second, third or even fourth email id to orkut's Contacts section in 'Edit Profile'. If you are signed-in to orkut, just click here to get there. All searches for any of the added addresses would lead the searcher to your profile.

An Introduction to Feed Readers (aka Aggregators)

What are Feeds?

The Internet is a huge place. Literally billions of websites, and many of them keep changing day by day, if not minute-by-minute. How do you keep track of the latest things going on the websites / blogs we like? You can't possibly consider going to each and every site and keep hitting the 'refresh' button every now and then, can you?

This is why RSS was introduced. RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is an XML output of the latest changes to a website's content. If the site is a blog, RSS will update itself each time there is a new post. The RSS output is called a feed, which will not contain any of the color information or javascript in the original post, but it will maintain the links. There is another feed standard, called Atom, which is usually shown as a second option when setting up a blog.

All popular blogging platforms such as Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad etc. have feeds, and are turned on by default. Some platforms even have feeds for comments to a particular post. Many forum softwares also provide feeds for latest threads, replies to a particular thread, posts made by particular members etc. There are even search engines which provide feeds to the latest results to search phrases!

How do we read the feeds?

"Ok", you'll say, "there are no more websites to check, but what do we do now? Open the feeds and keep hitting refresh button for the latest changes?!!?" HELL NO. There are dozens of online (web-based) and offline (desktop) softwares called 'Feed Readers'.

NewsOnFeeds.com has a huuuuge list of offline and online feed readers

Feed Readers

If you are using a desktop-based (offline) feed reader, they'll register the feed:// protocol to themselves, which means that (if all goes well) when you click on a link to a feed, the feed URL (usually ends with .xml, some times its a query string such as ?output=rss) will be directly passed to the reader.

In case you are using a web-based reader unsupported by your browser, you'll have to manually copy-paste the feed URL into that site.

Whichever the case, the reader then lets you tag the feed with keywords of your choice, for categorizing. Now, whenever you fire up your offline feed reader (or open/refresh the online reader's page), the reader will check all the feeds for updates, and shows you the content of the latest posts in a neat, single scrollable list.

Most readers let you search posts you have read in the past, star posts for later reference, email a post to your friends etc. Imagine searching all your favorite sites for a post, and you'll see how helpful this can be..

The good thing about online feed readers is that there is no installation to be done, which means you can use the site from public cafes or at a friend's computer, without changing anything. Just sign-in, and your own Personalized Newspaper is right there waiting for you.

Some bloggers / websites prefer to share only a portion of their posts via feeds, so that a feed subscriber who reads the summary (first few lines) of the post (or some times just the post title - as decided by the blogger), and finds it interesting, will visit the original site and see / click their ads. Oh I forgot to mention - feeds by default don't have ads - unless they are manually put in by the content owner.

Google Reader is the most popular feed reader worldwide. Head over to the site, and if you are not a user yet, they'll give you a quick intro as well.

How do I know whether my favorite site has feeds?

Sites with feeds usually display the orange feed icon (See FeedIcons.com for multi-sized samples), clicking on which you'll see the feed for the site. Some blogs show a list of feed readers, each with dedicated buttons which let you subscribe to their posts via specific readers in one click.

Browser support

Modern Browsers (Opera 9, Firefox 2 & IE7 do, I'm not sure about older versions.) will display the icon at the right end of the address-bar itself. Click on the icon to see a preview of the current feed listings.

If you are using Firefox 2.0 or above, it will show you a list of supported readers, from which you can set one as default, if you want. I've chosen Google as the option, which means that each time I click on a feed icon, a page asking me to choose either iGoogle or Google Reader shows up.

Latest versions of IE, Firefox & Opera have inbuilt feed readers, albeit simple ones. (Firefox's reader is called Live Bookmarks)

Feed-related Services

FeedBurner (now owned by Google) helps you monetize your feeds, as well as provide a permanent feed URL. You'll be able to change blog platforms without changing your feed URL. My feedburner URL, for example, is feed://feeds.feedburner.com/liveash/blog (the part after .com is customizable.) The monetizing part comes only after you have about 50,000 subscribers, so don't expect to make a quick buck just yet!

Yahoo Pipes is a bit more complicated service; it lets you create mashups of feeds. That is, you can combine different feeds programmatically (with if/else , for/while loops and much more) to create a customized feed.

List of Geek Feeds

To help you get started, here are a few (geeky) feed URLs which I have subscribed to:

• Digg / Technology > http://www.digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml
• Digital Inspiration (Famous Indian Blogger, Amit Agarwal) > http://feeds.feedburner.com/labnol
• GigaOm / Web (Om Mallik, a US-centric Indian Tech Blogger) > http://feeds.feedburner.com/gigaom/software
• Google Blogoscoped (All things Google, and then some!) > http://blogoscoped.com/rss.xml
• Guardian Unlimited: Technology blog > http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/index.xml
• TechCrunch (Michael Arrington, one of the most respected tech bloggers, posts here) > http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch
• Lifehacker - They cover a lot of topics, so you better go to http://lifehacker.com/about/#5 and choose a feed that suits your needs. They provide multiple feeds for each tag, for each author etc.
• Official Google Blog > http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
• Mashable! (A bit too geeky, newcomer) > http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mashable

Gmail Tip : Access your Addressbook in One Click

All of my contacts are stored in my Gmail Contacts list : emails, phone numbers, addresses, IM usernames (available in Gmail 2.0). The advantages of having a central access point available from anywhere is a great advantage, but getting the info quickly has been quite a pain. Waiting for the full-fledged Gmail UI to load is quite time-consuming - even for getting a single email address, you have to wait several seconds.

Not anymore! The new Contact Manager, available in Gmail 2.0 (The new version of Gmail, with preloaded messages, attachment icons etc..) can be accessed via its own URL. Just bookmark the link below.

Gmail Contacts Manager : http://mail.google.com/mail/contacts/ui/ContactManager

Of course, you'll have to be logged into your Google Account for this to work.

Update: The Official Google Blog has a post with a few tips as well.

Tips for Using Images in Blogs

This post on the 'Google Blogoscoped' blog hints on some helpful things to remember, when using images in your blog posts.

Good read, except that they seem to dislike the GIF format, which I use frequently on my websites. Being a web designer, I would prefer to use GIF-formatted images on my site than PNG ones. Why?

When displaying graphics with transparent portions (such as a curved border for a section), GIF is the only way to go. This is because IE6 doesn't fully support PNG transparency, and will cause problems when using PNGs, more often than not.

There seems to be some efforts to solve this, but a workaround is always a workaround.