Facebook and the N900 address book

The N900 address book can merge multiple contacts into a single entity: if you have a friend that has a phone number, an email address, a Jabber user name, a MSN one and so on, then you can merge all of the different entities into a single meta-contact.

Locally stored details and an IM user name in the same contact
Locally stored details and an IM user name in the same contact

The different IM contacts are tracked through their username and should be immutable[1], but yesterday Facebook changed all the IDs from something like “u123456789@chat.facebook.com” to “-123456789@chat.facebook.com”. For the address book this means that all the previous contacts were deleted from the IM roster and new contacts were added, so you get duplicate contacts. Moreover, when a contact is removed from the roster we leave the IM user name in the contact details, if you click the button you can add the contact back to one of your rosters. In the Facebook case this means that you end up with all of your meta-contacts with a useless button that cannot do nothing.

The fix for this is to remove the old IDs and merge your contacts again, simple but tedious. A better way to do it is to be patient and wait until I finish a program that will do it for you in a few click ;)

Update: I finished and release the program, see my blog post about Facebook migrator.

[1] Actually, some changes in the IDs are possible for normalisation purposes; if you add “FooBar@example.COM” it will become “foobar@example.com” in your roster. (And yes, the normalisation is buggy in PR1.1, but it will be fixed in PR1.2.)

17 thoughts on “Facebook and the N900 address book”

  3. Empathy has plans to include meta-contacts for their long-term goals which you can see at http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Roadmap

    I would love to have contacts act as objects/files where multiple programs (evolution, empathy, etc) can access contact files in a folder (Home > Contacts?).

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  5. Thank you so much for doing this! It’s amazing that people like you help out like that. Thank you again, from all of us.

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  8. Where would I find documentation on the contact database? I might able to write my own shell script.

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  9. @Daniel: it’s undocumented and not supposed to be modified directly. There are different DBs, a BSD one for the local contacts, plus a sqlite one per account. The consistency between the main DB and the IM ones is very important or things will stop working in weird ways.

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  11. Pingback: Marco Barisione’s Weblog » Merge back your Facebook contacts
  12. Pingback: Merge back your Facebook contacts | Maemo Nokia N900

  13. I saw the duplicated ids, but thought it was me playing with the facebook contacts 😀

    Can’t wait to see that application!

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  14. Very nice ! Now, could this application move the Extras Facebook plugin contacts to the PR1.2 official Facebook chat plugin ?

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  15. it doesnt work for me…I run it, it says all contacts were successfully merged & gives me only the option to “finish”. but NONE of them are merged! what could be the problem

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  17. Are you sure ?
    In the first step, it just shows which contacts it thinks are mergeable, then you have to select the ones to merge, and only then it will merge them.
    Did you try selecting contacts in the proposed list ?

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