Many people are interested in trying out Google’s new social network Google+, but trying to re-add hundreds of friends is tedious. Facebook deliberately prevents users from exporting the email addresses of their friends directly. However, there is an indirect, legal way to extract all of your contacts from Facebook in a format suitable to be imported into any other social network or email system such as Gmail or Microsoft Outlook.

  1. Set up a free Yahoo Mail account.
  2. Select the “Contacts” tab and click “Import Contacts”
  3. Select “Facebook” and sign in with Facebook credentials.
  4. Yahoo imports the email addresses of all your Facebook friends automatically.
  5. Again on the “Contacts” tab, select “Actions” and click “Export All”
  6. Select “Export All” as Yahoo CSV (comma separated values list).
  7. Save this backup file to your local computer. You can open it in Excel or any text editor.
  8. Now sign into Google+. If you don’t have Google+ yet, sign up for a free Gmail account and skip to step 12.
  9. In Google+, select “Circles” and then “Find and Invite”.
  10. Select Yahoo and sign in with your Yahoo credentials.
  11. Google+ automatically imports all of your friends. If they are already on Google+ you can now add them to a circle. If they are not on Google+, you can send them an email invitation.
  12. If you don’t have Google+ you can also just import your friends into Gmail contacts and they will then appear in Google+ if/when you do sign up. To do this, log into Gmail and select Contacts, then Import Contacts. Gmail will ask you where your CSV file is stored (from step 7). Once it has uploaded, all of your Facebook friends’ email addresses will be in your Gmail contacts.
  13. Note that you can also use the Yahoo contact exporter to transfer Facebook friends’ emails into Microsoft Outlook or any other email/ address book (you might have to export as Vcard or some other format if the CSV option doesn’t work).

And that’s it! I look forward to seeing all of you on Google+.

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