One of the main issues with facebook is the fact that its terms of services (TOS) wouldn’t let its users to download the contact details of their friends. It is actually a very bad thing to do especially when we consider the fact that facebook does use the APIs of other service providers (like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc) for accessing the contact list that the user have saved in those sites / networks.

We know that service providers like Google allows you to download the contact list as a CSV file, which you can import to any other email client and can access your contacts from there. The same feature allows me to synchronise my contact list in Google server with that in my Android (ADP1) phone.

In fact, if you google the phrase ‘facebook contact downloader’, then you could see that there are few "Facebook Downloader" applications for your Windows and some "Facebook Sync" applications for Mac. But the fact is that, if you use any of these tools then facebook may suspend your account (as it is against the TOS). Hence you are putting your account at risk.

This edition of techblog introduces you to a method using which you could download you contact list in a legitimate way – Fonebook.

Fonebook is essentially a facebook application that allows you to import your facebook contact to Microsoft Outlook (MS outlook). It essentially acts as a plugin for your MS Outlook application. It allows you to download photos, web address and even birthdays of those who are in your Facebook contact list.

You can download and install the application from Facebook site. Initially, I thought it may not be of much use since I can’t download the email and phone numbers but later found that it can really act like a ‘sync’ tool in MS Outlook and I can easily add those who are not there in my contact list (btw, I have to add the email address manually!)

(Note: If you a developer, you can check the trace.txt in ‘My Documents’ folder for log information)

Go ahead and give it a try!