Published in: Facebook

Search the Facebook Apps directory for something like “export contacts” and you’ll find quite a few applications that sound as if they can transfer your friends contact information out of Facebook.

There’s an app called “Export Friends” that will save you friends names, city, birthday and their current location in a CSV (text) file that you then import into Gmail or any other web email programs. Then there are social plug-ins that can sync photos and status updates of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Outlook.

The problem is that none of these apps can download what you are looking – the phone numbers and email addresses of your Facebook friends. There are Greasemonkey scripts (or hacks) that can pull this information from Facebook through “web scraping” but don’t ever take that route as Facook might ban your account forever.

Facebook APIs don’t expose email addresses of users and hence none of the Facebook apps can provide you with the actual contact data of your friends. There’s however a simple (and perfectly legal) workaround that can help you easily download all your friends email addresses from Facebook’s walled garden.

The trick, as you can see in the video, is actually quite simple.

Go to address.yahoo.com and click the Facebook icon. A login dialog should pop-up, just sign-in with your Facebook credentials and within seconds, you entire Facebook address book will be available inside your Yahoo Mail Account. Once the import is done, open address.yahoo.com/?_src=&VPC=tools_export to download a CSV file with the email addresses of all your Facebook contacts to your desktop.

You can then import the CSV file into Gmail Contacts, LinkedIn, your phone address book or any of the social sites where you want to connect with your existing Facebook circle.

Related: How to Download Facebook Photo Albums

Update: If Yahoo! is unable to import your Facebook Address book, open your Facebook page and choose “Application Settings” under Account. Next remove the “Yahoo! Contact Importer” application from your Facebook profile and try the steps mentioned in the video again.