Back-up Your Facebook Contacts

Have you ever wondered if you could save or store contact information on all the friends you have on Facebook?  Think about all the people from your past you’ve reconnected with, or if you have a Fan or Business page, all the contacts and networking you have with that group of folks. What if your account was suddenly disabled and you were cut off from your friends/contacts? This has happened to quite a few people, including Guy Kawasaki. It seems that if you ‘network’ too much, you could be disabled with no warnings.

Evidently, Facebook has a way to monitor activity in people’s accounts and if it looks too ‘spammy’, you’ll get whacked.

Facebook has two apps that can be used to make a backup of all your friends. One is called Friend CSV.

I used this program and it downloaded it and emailed a .csv file to me. I figured it was a good thing to do and probably good to run every few months to keep it updated. I’ll also run the program for my clients who are on Facebook.

You will notice that there is no checkbox for email or phone numbers. This is a source of consternation and concern for many Facebook users. There are ‘underground’ apps out there that you can install and run to capture the missing data, but from what I’m reading, you do so at your own risk. Take a look at this blog post from January, 2009  by Eric Eldon where he talks about blogger, Robert Scobler’s account being disabled  The program in question is My FB Contacts 1.0 I’ve been reading stories about how some people are hesitating to use it, thinking they could get kicked off abruptly.

The other app from Facebook, is called Fonebook. I’m not even linking to it as the feedback was abysmal for this app.

Evidently, Robert Scobler didn’t hold any hard feelings after his account was disabled (I believe it was reinstated), as you can read his article from a couple of weeks ago where he spent some time with Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg at the recent World Economic Forum. He spoke to him about his feelings on Facebook’s policies. So we’ll see where that goes.

Happy Facebooking!