Add Your Facebook Friends & Photos to Google+

posted on 20th Jul 2011

There’s been countless articles posted on Google+ in the last few weeks. Is it a Facebook killer, a Twitter killer, a LinkedIn killer a Foursquare killer? The truth is it’s probably none of the above. An interesting stat I picked up on last week was Google’s Q2 profits in 2011 coming in at more than Facebook’s entire revenue for 2010. If something is going to undo Facebook it will probably be Facebook itself (think privacy, user satisfaction and too many ads for a start).

Add Facebook Friends

Soon after Google+ launched facebook blocked an application that allowed users to easily export their friend list, as this post points out, afraid people will migrate their list to Google+. Yes we have been here before, if you can cast your mind back to 2010 Google blocked Facebook from accessing user info, on the basis that Facebook doesn’t share it’s info, so why should Google? It perhaps underlines Facebook’s fast and loose attitude towards privacy, Facebook shares your information when it suits them too. They share this information with Yahoo for example.

It’s precisely this loophole that’s exploited in this video, which shows you how to get around the Facebook block on exporting your friends list.

Add Facebook Photos

One of the most used, and most engaging features on Facebook is photos. It’s also one of the most important to the platform as it keeps people locked into using Facebook. After all if you have 3 years of photo’s uploaded to Facebook it would be a lot of hassle to re-upload them elsewhere – and in many cases the photos on Facebook may be the only copy you have, so first you would need to be able to download them.

You can download them on one by one, or, thanks to this article, use a new Google Chrome extension called Move Your Photo’s which allows you to do just that – from Facebook to Google+. You’ll need to be using the Chrome browser to make full use of this, but you can selectively pick and choose what albums and photo’s you wish to bring across. It won’t take across any comments, descriptions or tags, but at least you get those all important photo’s.