A XING contacts exporter

Disclaimer: This is a very old post. I have long moved off of OpenBC / XING, but kept this article here for archiving purposes.

I have been playing with quite a few social network sites in the past (Xing, wkw, LinkedIn, flickr, last.fm). An issue I have with XING in particular is that with a free account, XING does not allow me to export my connections (at least I did not find a way to do that).

After Sebastian convinced me (and, apparently, a few others too) to create a profile on Facebook, I was faced (no pun intended) with the same problem again: How do I synchronize all my contacts between the various sites? After all, most of my professional contacts are on XING. But how can I invite them to Facebook without manually entering all names and addresses again?

This time I decided to solve this issue. I created a Greasemonkey script that steps through all pages of my XING contacts and puts a list of email addresses onto the last page. This allows me to copy and paste them into e.g. Facebook.

Here is the script: xing_export.user.js

Disclaimer: I only tested it on my personal profile, and only with the account language set to German or English. If you give it a try, please let me know how it worked out.

Installation is pretty simple: First, install Greasemonkey. Then, click the link above and Firefox will display an installation dialog:

Then, select "Install", and the script will be copied to your Firefox profile directory.

After successful installation, go to the first page of your XING address book, and in the Firefox menu, choose Tools / Greasemonkey / User Script Commands / Fetch contacts:

The script will page through your complete address book and fetch the name of the contact and everything that looks like an email address. Once the script is finished with the last page, it will paste all gathered addresses into the page. You can then copy the text to the clipboard and paste it into where you want it.

For Facebook, I pasted the addresses into a new text file and used the "Find friends" function:

Then, I chose to upload a contacts file:

and the file can finally be uploaded:

After a successful upload, Facebook checks its user database for matching email addresses and lists those members that match the uploaded file:

Finally, "Add as friends" will invite the matching contacts.

The script allows you to dynamically set a log level (see menu screenshot above). In case something goes wrong, setting the log level to INFO or DEBUG should provide some insight.

Naturally, I am interested in feedback on how the script works for you. Please drop me a mail.

Back in 2006, I wrote about discovering openBC, which later became XING.