14 DAY TRIAL // With Google+ being launched, the first true possible competitor to Facebook in years is now available. While it's still very early and Google isn't even letting everyone in yet, there is quite a lot of interest in the new social network and one of the first things many users do when creating a new account is to try to take their Facebook friends along with them.
Facebook specifically forbids this, but there are workarounds. For the past few months and until very recently the Facebook Friend Exporter for Google Chrome was one of them.
[admark=1]Facebook though, since the extension saw a surge in popularity after the launch of Google+, moved to block it, leading it to fail to work as supposed. Mohamed Mansour, the developer behind the extension promised to come up with another way of getting your data and said an update was coming.
The update is here and Facebook Friend Exporter is working again with Facebook, at least to the degree than it can retrieve your contacts list. The actual process of gathering all of the data is very slow.
And it's possible that it has stopped working again as some users report the tool either failing or retrieving only information that would not be useful for batch import of Facebook friends into Google+.
It's unclear whether this means that Facebook is actively working to block this specific extension, or whether the new method still needs some work, but users are getting mixed results for the latest update.
Still, if you really want to get your Facebook friends into Google+, or just out of Facebook, it won't hurt to give the updated version of Facebook Friend Exporter a try.
Of course, a simple tool from Facebook would solve all of these problems and also show that the social network is not afraid of competitors and that it doesn't need to hoard your data to stay ahead. That's unlikely to happen though.
Update: The developer behind Facebook Friend Exporter is now saying that this updated version won't fully work either, but you can expect an updated over the weekend.