Facebook gets contact-exporting tool

Open source software company, Open-Xchange has released a tool that migrates Facebook contact information, reports Cnet.

The technique uses the company's SocialOX tool, which provides what CEO Rafael Laguna calls a “magic address book” that draws on online address books at LinkedIn, Gmail, and other sites.

Laguna explains: “The cloud needs to be open - just as source code and data protocols needed to be open to create the Internet. With more data moving into and being created inside the cloud, this data needs to be owned by the creators, not the services.”

The software can take contact information and associate it with e-mail addresses and other information by scanning a user's IMAP-based e-mail accounts, states The H.

It can then freely export these newly-derived contacts in vCard format, ready for importing into GMail, Google+ or any other service.

Cnet Asia says the tool is arriving weeks after Google rolled out a closed beta test of its Google+ service.

However, Facebook is blocking access to another tool that can be used to move contact information to Google+.

ZDnet claims the debate centres on who exactly has control over contact information.

On Facebook, people can share information with their contacts, but Facebook doesn't permit automated extraction.

Google, eager to press any advantage it can get over Facebook, makes people export this information, as long as their contacts have shared it.