I was about to get my friends’ email addresses out of Facebook….

Eric Eldon | January 3rd, 2008

myfacebookemails010308.pngPlaxo, the contact manager service, has been testing a way to 1) collect all of your Facebook friends’ names, email addresses and birthdays from their Facebook profiles, using optical character recognition technology, then 2) export this information to your Plaxo address book.

I was about to test the service out this morning.

The company had already been testing it with blogger Robert Scoble. As a result, he just got banned from Facebook. Now I’m trying to figure out whether or not I should run the service — do I want to have all of my friends’ contact information in one place, or do I want to keep using Facebook?

Here’s how Plaxo gets your email. Facebook currently displays your email address on your Facebook account as an image. Screenshot, above, taken from my Facebook profile. As McCrea described the exporter to me: “So, We cooked up some adaptive optical character recognition foo….”

In other words, Plaxo takes the image of your friends’ email addresses and figures out the text of your email address that the image represented. It does this for every friend you have on Facebook, then exports and syncs all of this information with the other contact information contained in your Plaxo account.

Here’s how Scoble got busted. Facebook detected Plaxo running a script that processed these images for all of Scoble’s 5,000 friends — this action violates Facebook’s terms of service, so the company banned him.

But, before he was banned, Scoble was able to use Plaxo to match up more than 1,800 of his Facebook friends with his existing contacts in Plaxo.

While Plaxo wasn’t planning on releasing this service for a couple of weeks, the company has let Scoble explain what he was up to, here.

Facebook really is the main place that I socialize online, because that’s where most of my friends are. Apparently, I now have to choose between having all of my contacts in one place, or continuing to use Facebook.

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11 Trackbacks

  1. January 3rd, 2008
    11:01 am

    bwl zwei null » Facebook wirft Scoble raus said:

    [...] Was war passiert? Scoble hat mittels einer ganz neuen Software von Plaxo versucht, die Kontaktdaten seiner 5.000 “Freunde” von Facebook zu exportieren und diese mit seinem Adressbestand [...]

  2. January 3rd, 2008
    2:31 pm

    VentureBeat » Is it okay to scrape your friends email addresses off Facebook? Poll by SodaHead said:

    [...] Plaxo to remove information from Facebook friends’ email addresses from their profiles (our coverage )? I agree that you should — after all, if somebody both Facebook-friends you and displays [...]

  3. January 3rd, 2008
    2:52 pm

    VentureBeat » Poll by SodaHead: Is it okay to export friends’ emails from Facebook said:

    [...] Plaxo to remove information from Facebook friends’ email addresses from their profiles (our coverage)? I agree that you should — after all, if somebody both Facebook-friends you and displays [...]

  4. January 3rd, 2008
    4:10 pm

    Is it okay to scrape your friends email addresses off Facebook? Poll by SodaHead | BlogForward : Money said:

    [...] Plaxo to remove information from Facebook friends’ email addresses from their profiles (our coverage)? I agree that you should — after all, if somebody both Facebook-friends you and displays [...]

  5. January 4th, 2008
    9:11 am

    Josh Kim dot Org » Blog Archive » Your data. YOUR. said:

    [...] to import names, birthdays, and email addresses of his friends on Facebook to Plaxo by using their optical character recognition technology. Which got his account temporarily disabled, and he got it back soon after agreeing not to run the [...]

  6. January 4th, 2008
    1:35 pm

    stefan.waidele.info » Meine Datenbank gehört mir! said:

    [...] US-Blogger Robert Scoble wollte dies (bei Facebook) nicht tun, sondern nutzte ein Programm, das dieses “Abtippen” für ihn erledigen sollte. Und wurde dafür von Facebook gesperrt. (Habe zu wenig gelesen, um beurteilen zu können, ob er sich wieder anmelden darf - darum geht es ja auch gar nicht). (Schöne Zusammenfassung bei Venture Beat) [...]

  7. January 4th, 2008
    9:02 pm

    VentureBeat » Roundup: More Google departures, the future of Android, and more said:

    [...] instead, such as Scoble’s Facebook account getting temporarily disabled (yes, our coverage here). He points to a number of ways that tech and Kenyan news intersect, such as locals using blogs and [...]

  8. January 8th, 2008
    11:02 am

    VentureBeat » Facebook, Google, Plaxo join Data Portability — lots of hype, even more work to do said:

    [...] do things like export their Facebook friends’ emails en masse to other applications (see our coverage of Plaxo’s back-door effort to do this on Facebook, last [...]

  9. January 8th, 2008
    11:02 am

    VentureBeat » Facebook, Google, Plaxo join Data Portability — lots of hype, even more work to do said:

    [...] do things like export their Facebook friends’ emails en masse to other applications (see our coverage of Plaxo’s back-door effort to do this on Facebook, last [...]

  10. January 9th, 2008
    1:25 pm

    VentureBeat » Analysis: FriendFeed shines, Plaxo Pulse grows — replacing Facebook news feeds? said:

    [...] when it tried its latest initiative — extracting friends’ emails from Facebook (our coverage) — it got mixed [...]

  11. April 8th, 2008
    2:19 pm

    ocr said:

    [...] [...]

9 Comments

  1. January 3rd, 2008
    10:17 am

    jalexanian said:

    why don’t you just use Google Notebook?

  2. January 3rd, 2008
    10:18 am

    Noah Everett said:

    I don’t know if I can blame Facebook for their actions, but I understand the frustration of the user. Thats an interesting battle between openness and a company’s right to retain all the data it has collected. I’m neutral.

  3. January 3rd, 2008
    12:54 pm

    courtney benson said:

    My take on this is that all will be forgiven soon! After all PodTech.net and the Scobblizer are helping to get the word out on social networking and openness. We all benefit as a result.

  4. January 3rd, 2008
    2:11 pm

    Aaronontheweb said:

    FriendCSV didn’t work… This doesn’t work…. Damnit.

  5. January 3rd, 2008
    3:00 pm

    Bohol said:

    Plaxo is benefiting from someone’s hard labor. I think this is not right.

  6. January 3rd, 2008
    4:53 pm

    Nate said:

    Uh.., if its so wrong to export contact data from other systems.., maybe Facebook should turn off their import tool that scrapes addresses from msn,yahoo,gmail,live,verizon,comcast, etc.

  7. January 3rd, 2008
    6:10 pm

    Jason F. said:

    Well, the irony is that most websites out there using a webmail address book importer are actually using a Plaxo-developed tool.

    I’d have to side with Facebook on this one, though–the whole reason for having emails displayed as images is to prevent spammers from having a field day. (And preserve Facebook’s role as an alternative form of communication, of course)

  8. January 4th, 2008
    12:22 am

    Eric Blair said:

    “My FB Contacts is a free and easy way to export and backup the contact details of your friends on Facebook. Once exported you can then import your contacts in to your Gmail, Hotmail or Outlook account.”

    http://myfbcontacts.blogspot.com/

  9. April 11th, 2008
    8:38 am

    ramzy gooda said:

    للمعرفة يا حبايب

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