Honestly, how did we end up in a situation where some website has a complete list of everybody's friends and family email addresses and doesn't grant you access to them?

One culprit is probably spam. Your email address became something to hide for fear of being spam bombed. This prevented any sort of universal person->email directory from being feasible and necessitated an intermediary sevice like facebook to share contacts publicly.

You can try this bookmarklet:

http://vytautas.jakutis.name/2011/05/27/convert-your-faceboo...

Streisand effect: I found out Google+ was actually scaring Facebook to the point that they aggressively try to prevent users from switching, so I decided Google+ must was worth taking a look at.

Goldman Sachs must be flapping over the PR plus is getting.

Google really do seem to have product momentum - an FB account could very soon be Myspace cool.

Also I sense there is something going on with G/Twitter at the moment - the plus launch and the firehose issue all seem too coincidental - feels like some M&A brinkmanship to me.

Nobody stays king for long. Social networking sites are only good until the next best thing. I'll bet a good dollar within 5 years Facebook will lose much of its popularity. Then Google+, ... In the meantime, Facebook will do little things like this to slow the exodus. Is anybody really that attached to Facebook?

One way around this:

1) Import your Facebook contacts to Yahoo! (you can create a throwaway account for this if necessary). http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2010/03/facebook-friends-meet-...

2) Import the contacts from Yahoo! to Gmail: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12118

It's been a while since I did this, but it worked fine then. No guarantee it still does.

Edit: I'm assuming here that it's easy to get the contacts into Google+ once you have them in GMail. If that's not the case, never mind. :-)

When you are in your circle editor, all of your Gmail contacts are visible. Additionally, there is a "import from Yahoo!" button directly in the circle editor.

Good to know. So why did I get modded down?

Modded back up. Maybe it was FB employees? :-)

This is counter-productive and just adds another good reason to turn to Google+. Despite switching costs, it's hard to like a service that coerces you to stay by preventing you from exporting your own data.

You could just use the official download option. Also another way is to sync your phone with Facebook friends, also sync phone contacts with Google contacts via exchange. Job done.

The official download doesn't include emails.

Are your friends email addresses available to a Facebook app with the appropriate rights?

I don't know if it's still the case but you used to be able to use the API to get hashed copies of your friends email addresses (so if a service could rehash the emails of their own users and hook up the users if they're friends on Facebook).

Obviously Google probably have the largest database of email addresses in the world so they probably could just hash them all and figure out who your friends are.

Does anyone know a way to import Facebook photos, too?

From Facebook: "You can render the current profile photo for any object by adding the suffix /picture to the object URL."

Here's me: http://graph.facebook.com/yesbabyyes/picture?type=large

iPhone syncing does grab the profile photos.

So how would you go from there to import them into Google+? Sharing them to Picasa or something? Well, I don't know if iPhone has that but I think Android does, and I'm trying to figure out how it would work on Android.

You stay classy, FB.

Whew! For a second, I thought we'd have a day without another endless series of Google+ advertisements--er, links.