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FbCal Puts Facebook Birthdays in Your Calendar
Posted by Gina Trapani at 5:00 AM on May 29, 2008
One of the best side effects of using Facebook is knowing when your contacts' birthdays are—but you only see them if you log in. The Facebook application fbCal is out to fix that. Once you install it on Facebook, fbCal creates an iCal file for your Facebook contacts' birthdays as well as Facebook events. Subscribe to the feed in your iCal-enabled calendar app of choice, like Mac's iCal or Google Calendar. When I tried fbCal last night, I subscribed to the resulting birthday .ICS file in Google Calendar, and nothing showed up. This morning, however, all my friends' birthdays were lighting up my schedule, so give it some time to get working. Actually-useful Facebook applications are few and far between, but fbCal is definitely one of them. Thanks, Sam!
Tags: birthdays | facebook | fbcal | google calendar | organise
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
Chris
Posted May 29, 2008 12:44 PM
Doesn't work for Google Calendar at the moment.
petebocken
Posted 9:22 AM 29/5/08
Ya, i can't get the subscribe links to work either. Guess i'll have to import it manually. Seems like it's defeating the purpose since any new friends will not be added.
petebocken
nka
Posted 9:11 AM 29/5/08
the webcal and http links didn't work for me. I had to import the calendar and made the mistake of importing it into my personal calendar, rather than making a new fbcal calendar and then importing the birthdays into there. If you do have to import as I did, do yourself a favor and create a new calendar, in advance, that you can import into.
nka
jdanto
Posted 7:34 AM 29/5/08
Anyone else getting an error for the birthday URL addition to gcal? So far I can get the events calendar to work but not the birthday one...
jdanto
blackheart-uk
Posted 7:17 AM 29/5/08
It's irritating that facebook are so short-sighted so as not to have included this in their base product, but fbCal does indeed fill a gap and do it well.
blackheart-uk
abhiroop
Posted 5:25 AM 29/5/08
I'm sure this is just paranoia but is there any other way to do this?
abhiroop
abhiroop
Posted 5:25 AM 29/5/08
I'm still a little weary about adding facebook apps:
[news.bbc.co.uk]
abhiroop
Pash91
Posted 5:18 AM 29/5/08
What about FacebookSync? Your address book contacts have to match the Facebook ones exactly or it won't work, but it works well for people who don't change their name to something ridiculous
Pash91
MiddleGeek
Posted 12:39 PM 29/5/08
It did not work for me, but I did not try importing it. Won't you have to import it every so often to get it to remain accurate? (Assuming you are adding friends from time to time.)
MiddleGeek
David Hunter
Posted 3:46 PM 29/5/08
works for me in Thunderbird (I did set up a new calendar for it).
Been using this for the last 8 months, it automatically updates when I get new friends, very neat.
David Hunter
mig_coconut
Posted 4:45 PM 29/5/08
works well, snap to load it into google calendar and thunderbird
mig_coconut
anudeglory
Posted 9:15 PM 29/5/08
The events calender worked straight away for me but the birthday calendar seemed to do nothing for a while then all of a sudden worked...I forget how long it didn't work for but just wait a little I guess.
anudeglory
Zypher
Posted 9:18 PM 29/5/08
If you're a [www.netlog.com] user (social network with 35 million users), you can get a birthday iCal feed from your friends at [netlog.com]
Netlog is a lot better than Facebook btw, so definitely give it a try ;-)
Zypher
ICEBreaker
Posted 11:17 PM 29/5/08
This is by far the coolest (actually the only decent) FB application I have seen!
ICEBreaker
irish_hoya
Posted 1:41 AM 30/5/08
Nice... Birthday calendar didn't work for me yesterday, but works like a charm today!
irish_hoya
stilly
Posted 5:13 AM 30/5/08
This product is great-- I don't use it for the birthdays, but I've been using it for quite some time to sync up the events that I've RSVPd to on facebook.
stilly