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

January 3, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

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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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • jalexanian
    why don't you just use Google Notebook?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • FriendCSV didn't work... This doesn't work.... Damnit.
  • Plaxo is benefiting from someone's hard labor. I think this is not right.
  • 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.
  • Jason F.
    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)
  • Eric Blair
    "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/
  • ramzy gooda
    للمعرفة يا حبايب
  • kassandra
    hey
    I don't know
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    মনে হয় সব কিছু ঠিক মত কাজ করছে না। আবার চষ্টা করে দখতে পারেন ঢন্যবাদ
  • edhardy622
    British law student sues Abercrombie-Fitch for disability discrimination.
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  • rachellongoria
    josefat it me natiel can u give me your number
  • rachellongoria
    so can u
  • rachellongoria
    so can u so can u pleazzzzzzz.