INFO-TECH

It’s pretty obvious that Google + is a threat to Facebook’s ever-growing base of users. The reason behind it is that Google + seems to be pretty much a Google version of a Facebook upgrade.

Well Facebook ain’t letting Google get their way that easy. What does Facebook have that Google doesn’t?

Data of your established Facebook friends, contact numbers, email addresses, etcetera. For Facebook and Google who already have established systems and working business models, data means users – and users means money.

Right now Google ‘owns’ most of the web. They’re the biggest player. And being the biggest player, you want a piece of everyone else’s pie. We all know that Google tried to go social more than once or twice. And failed.

The thing I love about Google is that they are not afraid to fail – even fail big. They still try to win. And this time, it certainly looks like Google is going to make it.

Now that the Google + Project is out for a limited amount of users, it has alarmed Facebook that Google might just eat up some of their share of the social network market. So what did they do?

There used to be an extension in Google Chrome named ‘Facebook Friend Exporter” that you can use to export your Facebook contact details – Name, Email Address, Phone number, etc…

That extension still exists. But it no longer works – because Facebook blocked it out.

In essence, Facebook blocked YOU out.

Yahoo even reports it in their Yahoo news.

But don’t worry because the author of the Facebook Friend Exporter Chome plugin promises a new version with a different design. He says it is currently undergoing deployment but you would have to do exports daily.

So now you can’t get your Facebook data using that extension. All this because they were afraid that their users might want their data, export it and import it to Google so that they could try Google +. It’s a pretty immature thing to do. But that’s that and you can’t really blame Facebook if they’re afraid of Google eating up a piece of the social network pie.

A company that has failed many times has more chances of getting it right the next time around. Facebook has all the reasons to be scared of the Google + Project.

You can still download your Facebook contacts by using the Yahoo Importer. This importer lets you download all your Facebook contacts into Yahoo if you click the Facebook icon. And from there, you can export your Facebook and Yahoo contacts to a CSV file (executable in Mircorsoft Excel) and voila! You’ve got your Facebook contacts with you.

If you’re looking to try Google + someday, you can simply import all your contacts from Yahoo and Facebook into your Google contacts by using that CSV file in Google’s importer. How?

Go to your Gmail account then on the upper left corner just below Mail, click on Contacts. A new left sidebar panel will appear and in it, you will see the Import Contacts option. Click on it and a pop-up will open for you to import any CSV file with your contacts in it.

I highly suggest that you export your Facebook data now before they block out Yahoo Importer too. It’s your data anyway – supposedly. Download it for backup or for future use. Things change and Facebook might not be a ‘Forever’ trend in the web.

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