Export your Facebook contacts to Google+

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Facebook has been making changes to their site and API in the last few weeks to try to stop the bleeding of facebookers to Google+ by making it more and more difficult to export your contacts.  It’s never been easy, but now it’s even harder, unless you know the one app that still has access to your contact data:  Yahoo! Mail!

Here’s how to export your facebook contact data to Google+.

In short, you’ll be doing this:

  1. Using Yahoo, import your Facebook contacts into your Yahoo contacts.
  2. Using Yahoo, export your Facebook contacts to a CSV file.
  3. Using your spreadsheet, filter out your non Facebook contacts.
  4. Using Google+, Import your Yahoo/Facebook contacts CSV file.

I recommend doing this NOW rather than LATER as this Yahoo Mail export will likely be closed off too, even if you don’t plan on moving to G+, it’s always good to have your contact data under your OWN control.

  1. Import your contacts from Facebook to Yahoo Mail.

    1. Log into your Yahoo mail account (http://mail.yahoo.com).  If you don’t have one, create one.  You don’t have to create a secondary one like other articles are claiming.
    2. Create a new contacts list (you’ll import your facebook contacts here):
      1. Click on your “Contacts” tab.
      2. Click on “New List”
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      3. Enter the name of your new contacts list.  I recommend “Facebook”:
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    3. Click on “All Contacts” (to make the Facebook import tool available), then click “Import Contacts”, then click “Facebook”.
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    4. You’ll be prompted to sign into Facebook, then prompted if you want to share your contacts with Yahoo, of course, you click “Okay”.
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    5. Click “View imported contacts”:
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    6. Now, move all those newly imported Facebook contacts into your Facebook contact list:
      1. Click “Select All”, then “Assign to Lists”, then check the “Faceboook” list.
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  2. Export your contacts to a CSV file:

    1. Open the “Actions” menu and choose “Export All”.

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    2. Click the “Export Now” button beside the “Yahoo CSV” text.

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      3. Choose a location to save your file.  THIS IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU REMEMBER WHERE YOU SAVED IT.  YOU’LL NEED TO FIND IT VERY SOON!!!!

    3. Skip to #4 if your Yahoo Mail account was freshly made and ONLY contains contacts from your facebook import.  This step is to help you filter out all the non Facebook contacts.

      1. Open your favorite spreadsheet program.  If you don’t have one, I strongly recommend LibreOffice.  It’s 100% free and is very compatible with Microsoft Office.

      2. Open your “yahoo_ab.csv” file that you just downloaded from Yahoo.  Your spreadsheet program will likely need some extra information about the format of your CSV file, since there are so many different ways.  Here’s the pertinent information you need to choose:

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        2. This image is from LibreOffice.  Microsoft Office Excel has a similar CSV import dialog box.  Click “OK” when you’re settings are right.

      3. A new spreadsheet will display your Yahoo Mail exported data.

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        2. Notice the “Category” column?  Some say “Facebook” (or, whatever you named your contact list in Yahoo before you imported your facebook data into it) and some don’t.

        3. Sort your spreadsheet by the “Category” column (Column F).

        4. Select all the rows that do NOT have “Facebook” as the category and delete those rows.

        5. Save you spreadsheet.  It’s up to you whether or not to overwrite your exported file or to save this as a new file.  Whichever you do, continue using THAT file in the next steps.  I’ll continue to refer to it as “yahoo_ab.csv”.  Do NOT save it as a spreadsheet file.  Keep it as a CSV file!!!

    4. Import into Google+

      1. Click your “Circles” tab at the top of the page, then click “Find people”, then “Upload address book”:

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      2. Your browser will provide you with a “File Open” dialog box.  Use that to browse to and find your “yahoo_ab.csv” file and choose it.

From there, you can drag them all into your Facebook circle (If you don’t have one, make one).

BTW, if you want an invite to Google Plus, e-mail me at image. That’s not a clickable e-mail address… It’s a picture to prevent spammers from easily scraping it. You’ll need to type that address, exactly as you see it, including the G and the + in front of the word “Invite”.

See this image? image_thumb26
You’ll find an actual working version of it at the bottom of this article. Please click the appropriate buttons in it to let your friends know about this article so they too can quickly quickly get up and going with Google+.

Check back later for updates too!

Click here to follow me on Google+.

Good Luck and Enjoy your new Google+ account!

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