birthdays | leaving Facebook

Jonathon Anderson

2011-07-12 15:31

I’m in the process of closing my Facebook account. I never really used it: I’m just not that sold on the idea of a fake social network that rules your life. There are three use cases for me, though, and I need to port the relevant data (or service) elsewhere: the birthday calendar; the instant messaging service, and the photos that are already there.

The birthday calendar

I don’t want to lose track of the birthdays that people have published on Facebook. Going forward, I’ll have to maintain the calendar myself, and that’s fine; but I need to port those birthdays to something more standardized. (That is, likely a regular calendar with iCalendar support.)

Much to my surprise, Facebook makes an iCalendar file available explicitly for birthdays. It’s under Events→Birthdays→Export Birthdays. This link provides a webcal: url, which wikipedia tells me is an unofficial url for serving iCalendar files. In OS X 1.6, this url was automatically parsed by iCal, which wasn’t precisely what I wanted, so I just addressed the same path over http: and got a standard .ics file in my Downloads.

I already have a ‘Birthdays’ calendar in Google Calendar (which I’ll probably be trying to move away from at some point, too) so I just imported this .ics file and merged it into the existing calendar. There’s definitely birthdays in there that I don’t really care about (sorry, peoples!), but I can filter those down as they come up.