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I don't get it. Couldn't this scraping be easily done with own Facebook API? Why should you run a scraper to find out all your friends?


Phone numbers aren't exposed via the Facebook API under any circumstance. For a long time it was the same with emails, including when Scoble wrote that script, but now you can get a user's email by specifically asking for that information via the permissions API.


This is not entirely true. A Facebook application can get an email address of an authorized user by requesting it [1] (in the authorization dialog, the user can choose to send the application either the email address they signed up with Facebook for, or a proxied Facebook email address). There is currently no way to use the Graph API to retrieve your friends' email addresses.

[1] To do this, your application has to request the email permission. There is no equivalent friends_email permission. See http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/permission...


Ah, true, yes, if I authenticate a Facebook application against my account I can't give it access to my friends' emails, which was the core functionality of Scoble's script.




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