How To Invite All Your Facebook Friends To Google+

If you where one of the lucky few (hundred thousand or so) that actually got in on the first round of invites to Google+ you've probably notice a nice barren landscape with few of your friends around. You've probably also notice that Google+ doesn’t have an option built in to transfer your Facebook friends. Well we've done some digging and came up with two options that should work for you.

Update: Over the weekend FaceBook blocked the Facebook Friend Exporter extension. The Yahoo option listed below may still work but it looks like they are working to block everyone from "taking" their friends with them to Google+

The first option comes via Mohamed Mansour on Google+ who shares what we think might be the easiest method of importing all of your Facebook users over from one service to the other. This option utilizes the Facebook Friend Exporter extension for the Chrome web browser. The tool adds an “Export friends” button to the Facebook toolbar so you'll also need that installed.

What this process does is add all of your Facebook friends to your Google Contacts. It does not actually add them to any of your Google+ circles. But you can do that later and with much great easy now that they are in your contacts. This might not be ideal, as it grabs all your FB friends however, this is far and away the easiest way to go about inviting and adding hundreds of friends on Google+. The best thing is it uses your Google Contacts to suggest people to invite using an easy drag and drop process.off adding them.

The second option, which is also fairly painless, involves creating or using an existing Yahoo account. This option will also allow you to connect with several other services like all your G-Mail, Windows Live Hotmail or AOL contacts.

1. Sign up (or log into) a Yahoo! Mail account, click the "Contacts” tab at the top, and then "Import Contacts." Authorize Facebook (or whatever other service you want) access to your Yahoo! address book. This will add them to your Yahoo account.
2. Log in to Google Plus (http://plus.google.com) and navigate to your "Circles" (https://plus.google.com/circles).
3. Click "Find and Invite", and then click Yahoo! Import your Facebook friends to the "Suggestions" section.

Either suggestion will be a bit time consuming, especially for those of you with hundreds or thousands of contacts. But at this time they appear to be the only viable options. I'm looking for an extension that will work with Firefox but so far I haven't found any.

I should also note that at this time Google has shut down Google+ invites as they are over capacity. So for now at least you'll need to wait to invite all your friends to connect with you. Last but not least for all you that are worried about removing any of your contacts if you don't like the service Google has a new tool called Google Takeout. In short, it’s a way to quickly and cleanly remove your data from Google Buzz, Google Contacts and Circles, Picasa, your Google Profile, and Google Stream.