Chrome extension makes switching from Facebook to Google+ ridiculously easy (UPDATE: Facebook blocks extension)

[UPDATE 1, July 5, 2011  8:31 Eastern]: Facebook has blocked the Chrome extension for exporting friends  Author Mohamed Mansour wrote on the extension page that “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. It will no longer work for many people. New version with a different design is currently deploying. You might have to do exports daily. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. Just bear with me.”

Transferring your Facebook contacts to Google+ is a bit tricky because of, you know, the walled garden of Facebook which restricts how you can take your social graph elsewhere (unlike the Google Takeout service). Some workarounds tackle the issue, like the Friends to Gmail web app which will copy your Facebook contacts to Gmail. You can also pull a similar stunt via Yahoo Mail. Both solutions, however, require that you first copy Facebook friends to an online address book and then use this data to build your social graph on Google+.

A new Chrome extensions takes the pain out of this, allowing you to continue building your Facebook relationships on Google’s social service in one easy step. It’s called Facebook Friend Exporter and right now works only with the English version of Facebook and only via standard HTTP connection (SSL Facebook isn’t supported yet). What’s best…

…this extension will slurp your friends’ information that they shared with, including first and last name, email addresses, phone numbers, screen names, web sites, addresses and birthdays. Of course, you’ll need the Chrome browser from Google which shouldn’t be a problem –one in five now runs the browser on their system. Don’t take our word for it, download the Facebook Friend Exporter extension for Chrome and try it out yourself. But do hurry up because Facebook Friend Exporter does not comply with Section 3.2 of Facebook’s terms of service which forbids third-parties to “collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.” In other words, this one’s gonna be short lived, folks.

via CNET