One address book
Suppose you have a list of contacts in your e-mail application as well as with Facebook or other social networks. How do you exchange information between these address books?
Create a master
Each application has its own list of contacts: for e-mail there’s an address book, Facebook has a list of friends, etc. How do you make sure that you have the full details everywhere? There are various solutions. On the one hand, you can “consolidate” the complete lists. This means that you create a kind of “master list” in one place (for instance in Outlook). On the other hand, you can complement this one master list with information about the same contacts from another list. For example, suppose that in your Outlook address book you have the name and the e-mail address of a contact but no photo or date of birth. You could retrieve these from Facebook and add them to Outlook.
Transfer to Facebook
Transferring contacts from other sources to Facebook is relatively simple. Indeed, Facebook is equipped with an excellent import function (in Find Friends) which allows you to retrieve contacts from Gmail or Outlook (Express) directly and add them to your list. If you use another e-mail program (for instance Thunderbird), you will have to export your address book to a file first from within the program and then import this file into Facebook. Facebook’s import function describes clearly how to do this. LinkedIn and Twitter also have an import function (at Twitter, it’s limited to address books from webmail accounts, though).
Import in one address book
The import and export function offered by most e-mail programs and webmail services allows you to easily aggregate all your e-mail contacts in one address book. Simply export all address books and then import them into your master address book, for instance in Outlook. LinkedIn also has a useful export function (Export connections). But how about your Facebook friends? Facebook doesn’t provide an export function for your friends list for privacy reasons. Note. Several hacks are circulating on the Internet which promise to help you, but you risk seeing your account closed if you use them.
Tip. Nevertheless, there’s a relatively simple way of importing your Facebook friends into an e-mail address book: use Yahoo! Mail (http://mail.yahoo.com) or GMX (http://www.gmx.com). Both e-mail services have an official import function for Facebook contacts. To use it, make sure that you’re logged in with Facebook in a second browser window. The import function will then connect directly with Facebook. Facebook will ask your permission to pass on the details from your account to Yahoo! or GMX. Next, the contacts will be retrieved.
From Yahoo! or GMX you can now export the new address book and import it in your favourite e-mail application!
From Facebook to Outlook
Do you wish to complement your Outlook address book with information from Facebook? There are several nifty tools for this purpose, such as Fonebook (http://www.developingtrends.co.uk/software/Facebook/Fonebook/Default.aspx) and Outsync (http://outsync.codeplex.com). They enable you to, for instance, add your friends’ profile photos to Outlook. Tip. When you sync your Outlook contacts with your smartphone, you will see these photos when your friends call.
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