This probably has to do with your privacy settings. I set it up so applications can get as little information from my profile as possible (though I hardly use any apps anyway). I tweaked them temporarily to get this to work, got my contacts, then undid my tweaks to regain data privacy.
Facebook is so hypocritical, "We wont let you export your friends email addresses" but when there's money/profitable partnerships involved sure go ahead take all you want.
Michael was correct to append the second statement with "unless it’s with a partner that’s making it worth our while." This just shows the arrogance of Facebook these days!
I was able to do this but I could only get 184 out of 221 contacts. Not sure what happened to the others. Could it be that they don't have an email address associated with their account?
All users have an email address associated with their account (for registration and login). Like zzleeper said though, some are probably hidden.
Also, you may have gotten multiple addresses for a single contact. For example, I created my Facebook account when I was in high school using my Gmail account, but when I started college, I had to add my college address to join my college network. So my Facebook account contains both my personal and college email addresses.
Anybody know how to set this? I tried to figure it out yesterday but gave up after a minute or two.
EDIT: Account (top-right) > Privacy Settings, click Customize Settings (lower middle, small text), then very last setting is your e-mail address visibility.
I'm not really sure what the big deal is here. I just tried this, and the only addresses it was able to import were for people with their email addresses set to public (or at least visible to me).
Has Facebook patched the issue already, or does Mike really think it's a security issue to do something automatically that you're already able to do manually or with a scraper?
It's just Arrington being an asshat, you've been able to do this since... forever. In fact I saw this exact guide (using Yahoo) 3 days ago on another site, pretty sure this is Mike recycling someone else's content.
I got the same thing with Safari and FF on OS X, then I remembered that I have blocked just about every backchannel between web pages and FB that I could find.
Are you using something like an AdBlocker script to block Facebook Connect or an extension like Facebook Disconnect? When I turned that stuff off, I was able to import a few hundred contacts...
I don't have a Facebook option to import from. I originally click a link entitled:
"
An easy way to import your contacts
Automatically bring family and friends into
Yahoo! Mail, from Facebook and your old
email accounts. Get your contacts now."
Then arriveat a page that doesn't have Facebook:
"Step 1 - Select Source
Importing contacts from your existing address books is easy. Just select the account(s) below where your contacts are stored.
Default Accounts
Another Yahoo! Account
MSN
Live.com
Hotmail
Gmail / Googlemail
AOL
A desktop email program (Outlook, AppleMail, etc...)
I just tried it an it worked fine for me in Chrome (OS X). I had changed my Yahoo settings to Yahoo Asia a while back so I could enable POP, and when I created the new email address it defaulted to Yahoo Asia.
Not sure if this played a part but I now have all my friend's email addresses in a CSV file on my local HD...
It took two tries, however. The first time, it imported 0 contacts. I tried it again less than five minutes later, using the same account, process, and browser. Worked fine.
Worked fine for me as well (using Chrome). I was able to get 591 out of 622 contacts, assuming those individuals changed their privacy settings to hide their email..
I just did this with Yahoo mail on Firefox. I just realized that it actually imported my wife's friend's emails since she was the one still logged into Facebook.
I'm not sure, but perhaps a combination of the following: They would rather you message them through facebook, and they fear fake-profiles friending people at random and collecting emails to be used for spam, were a query possible to collect them.
Always ends up with 0 imported contacts. Makes me wonder if Facebook have disabled this for now... ?