Thanks to the popularity of social networking platforms, up-to-date contact information is only a few clicks away. But for iPhone users, digging through social networking applications or using the iPhone web browser to get a contact phone number can become tedious. The Mac Address Book, and its syncing capability with the iPhone offer a great alternative. I’ve found a few tricks and tools to sync Facebook and Linkedin to my Mac Address Book, and from there to my iPhone:
1. Facebook Phonebook Exporter Greasemonkey script: This script will export phone numbers from a Facebook friend list. WARNING: This script currently uses a remote service to process contact information. So unless you plan to host the web app portion on your own server (code available on github), you will be sending some potentially private information to a remote server. Instructions on how to use this script are available.
2. Linkedin VCF file export: Linkedin offers VCF exporting of all contacts through the standard web interface.
3. AddressBook Sync: This Mac app will synchronize Facebook and Address Book contact pictures, birthdays and locations.
After running these tools, the Address Book had a few duplicates, and more then a few contacts that needed minor editing (usually involving moving firstnames and lastnames to their respective fields). Overall this is a huge time saver for a Mac/iPhone user since all contact information is now in one easy to access place.