Facebook Scavenger
Facebook Scavenger was a Firefox extension that stored data about your Facebook friends as you viewed their profile pages so that you could save a backup of the data for your personal use. Takedown of this extension was demanded by Facebook on March 13, 2008.
Christopher Finke is a software engineer at Mahalo. He is available for birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. 
January 4th, 2008 at 6:41 am
Very useful thanks :)
Just had a quick browse on FB and it also seems to add entries when you browse photo albums? I'm guessing that wasn't intended?
January 4th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Adam: No, not intended. I've updated it to fix that problem.
January 4th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
This is fantastic, but I think I found a bug in Firefox 3 beta 2 on Vista: After I installed the extension, whenever I opened a new tab with Ctrl+T the cursor would not be in the address bar (whereas usually when you open a new tab, the focus is automatically on the address bar so you can start typing an address immediately). When I uninstalled the extension the problem went away. I wonder if the extension is stealing focus from the address bar? Unfortunately, this is a dealbreaker for me. :( I haven't tested in Firefox 2.
January 4th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Jordan: This has been fixed in version 1.0.4.
January 4th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
You could also show Plaxo/Scoble how these things ought to be done. Give users a way to upload their CSVs and have them integrated, likely so that visitors can not figure out the source of the data and that people can opt out of the aggregation.
January 4th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Thanks a lot, this seems handy!
Just one small thing: I'd like to run it in the background for a while; I don't need to be reminded that it's there until I need it. When I installed it, it inserted its button into my toolbar (next to Back, Forward, Home, etc.) "Okay, fine", I thought, "I don't want it there, but I can hide it easily". So I hit "Customize" and dragged the button into the button manager popup thing so I wouldn't have to look at it all the time. But every time I restart Firefox, the button forces itself back into my toolbar - could you make it stop? I'd really rather be able to hide it.
Thanks again for taking the time to develop this!
January 5th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Thanks for this, I'll give it a go!
Can it also export as vCard, or is there an easy conversion from CSV to vCard?
January 5th, 2008 at 4:41 am
1.0.4 doesn't seem to work for Linux Firefox. In facebook-data.csv I just get one line:
"Id","Name","E-mail Address","E-mail 2 Address","E-mail 3 Address"
January 5th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I'd also love a vCard export option. Great plug either way, though.
January 5th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Adrian and Brian: vCard support is now available in version 1.1.
January 5th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Charlie: It's working for me in FF2 on Ubuntu. Make sure you surf around and view a few of your friends' profiles before exporting.
January 6th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Thanks for the great extension, it works quite well. On thing I noticed though is that it does not save letter with accents in fields other than the name. I tried to change the encoding when reading the file (with OpenOffice.org) and the characters with accents still won't show. Thanks in advance for checking it out.
January 8th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Thanks for the quick vCard update!
January 24th, 2008 at 6:08 am
Luckily, I saved the xpi to my hard drive!
February 19th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Dear Chris, Love this idea and doesn't violate Facebook terms, eager to save my contact details of all my new online Facebook buddies, but don't like being at the mercy of Facebook. I download and installed your Scavenger extension, but nothing happens, no icon in the toolbar as shown, why? Using Firefox current verion 2.0.0.12. Help? John.
February 19th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Just realised that the link for Scavenger on this page actually installs instead Facebook image-to-e-mail ver 1.2.3, so is Scavenger no longer available?
February 19th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
It's now downloading correct file, Scavenger Ver. 1.1.3, tested it on several friends profiles and yes it does what is says, it downloads all profile information, 'except' e-mail addresses, not one of the profile downloaded had the e-mail address, each time missing, curious why?
April 9th, 2008 at 8:52 am
[...] http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-scavenger [...]
November 5th, 2008 at 4:04 am
omg, how lame can the facebook team be. the real reason for them to reject that addon is because they want to force the poor facebook users to communicate internally instead of via email and then by looking at the content of the messages bombard them with specific adds and god knows what other reasons. "blind in one eye", how rude..