Who Owns Your Facebook Fan Data? Liberate It With Open-Xchange’s Contact Exporter
(UPDATED) As of Monday July 11th Open-Xchange's tool for transferring Facebook contacts to Google+ has had its access to Facebook revoked. Details here.
Remember all of those MySpace fans you spent months collecting that drifted away as the social network fell out of favor. It may be hard to imagine it now, but someday Facebook will probably not be the place that your fans spend online. Unfortunately for you, Mark Zuckerberg owns all of those fans. Or does he? In the days since the announcement of the Google+ social network, several attempts have been made to export Facebook Friends to Google. Facebook blocked at least one, but the latest, and perhaps most sophisticated, export tool was released open-source yesterday by Open-Xchange.
Their goal was to export Friends from Facebook into a GMail Address book and then re-use them inside G+ to define your "Circles.” So Open-Xchange developed an extension for their Social OX feature that enables copying of contacts back and forth using only each service's official API´s.
"Import to your liking, in Apple iCal, Gmail/G+, Facebook, Outlook, whatever you like," according to Open Xchange. "The data is also in the newly created 'Facebook' address book for more exporting or playing pleasure…Now, go out and enjoy this new found liberation. And by all means, go forth and enjoy YOUR data."
Get started re-capturing you fan here. Do it now.
As I read on various websites, one should not open a profile for Google Plus as a band or a brand as google asked pros to wait for some tools designed for them.
Moreover, the G+ profile is designed for a personal use only, as the Facebook one is (cf. FB Terms).
If you are thinking about using it, please do note this experience of Wax Tailor, a french artist who lost his fanpage because FB closed it after a violation of the terms (he was using FB with his artist name and not the personnal one and was administrating his fanpage from this profile) he recovered it thanks to the work and contacts of http://twitter.com/virberg but everybody does not have these contacts. (you can find the history here : http://virginieberger.com/2011/07/wax-tailor-vs-facebook-ca-narrive-pas-quaux-autres/).
Moreover, OpenXchange just allow you to export your personal contacts, not the fanpage contacts, as Yahoo Mail do. You then are not allowed to export your fans contacts if you use FB within their Terms of Service.
Finally, this do not allow you to export the OpenGraph of your fans or your page, Facebook still own this…
So you can open a Google Plus profile but should use it for professional contacts more than a fanbase if you want to stay on the Terms. Still, the export tool could help you to get the emails of your friends and send them an invite to your newsletter, wich is the only database you really own 🙂
@biochet Thanks for the info.
Google+ actually looks pretty cool. It is rather lonelier because not many people have jumped aboard yet.
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Bruce, The signup process is all screwed up right now. Im getting errors to confirm and to login. SUX!
Can’t connect to Facebook. Tried Firefox and Chrome.