It wasn’t long after we started hearing about a Google Chrome extension that lets people extract Facebook contacts ^[1] into services like Google+ that Facebook started blocking it.

“Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by July 5th. (The extension) will no longer work for many people,” writes Mohamed Mansour ^[2], the extension developer, who says he will build and maintain a new version.

According to ZDNet’s Emil Protalinski, Facebook Friend Exporter wasn’t designed with Google+ in mind, but has exploded in the past week as Google+ beta users look for ways to port over all their Facebook friends to Google+. He says now that the extension has more than 17,000 users, Facebook clearly noticed a spike in usage, and decided to block it.

Mansour told Protalinski that Facebook removed emails from their mobile site, which were critical to the original design of his extension, and that the company had implemented a throttling mechanism: if you visit any friend page five times in a short period of time, the email field is removed.

Mansour reacted by writing the following on his Google+ ^[3] profile:

I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again. Seriously … more motivation to figure out a different approach.

To read more, including tips for possibly getting the extension to still work for you, visit ZDNet ^[4]. TechCrunch, for its part, says Yahoo is the only backdoor ^[5] left to sneak your Facebook friends into Google+.