Facebook Blocks Friend Exporter Plugin

Facebook is actively trying to block Facebook Friend Exporter, a Google Chrome extension that lets you export the list and contact info of your Facebook friends for use in other services, the extension developer Mohamed Mansour claims.
“Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. (The extension) will no longer work for many people”, Mansour wrote on the extension’s homepage.
The Facebook Friend Exporter is a simple tool that lets you grab phone numbers, e-mails and other data from your Facebook friends, and directly import them into Google Contacts. The current version doesn’t work anymore, but the author promises to build and maintain new version that uses a different design.
CNET, however, notes that the tool is probably against Facebook’s Terms of Service, which states: “you will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”
Google, an online giant but a heavy underdog in the social networking race, has taken the opposite stance, having recently launched Takeout, a tool that lets you export all your data from various Google services.
A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
[via CNET]