Sync Facebook birthdays to your Google Calendar

[picklemonkey]

with FbCal

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2008/05/fbcal_puts_facebook_birthdays_in_your_calendar-2/

[toasty]

Re: Sync Facebook birthdays to your Google Calendar

looks very useful -- I like that it includes events as well. Thanks!

[picklemonkey]

Re: Sync Facebook birthdays to your Google Calendar

events can be done without an external app!

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/15/how-to-sync-facebook-events-with-google-calendar/

[picklemonkey]

Re: Sync Facebook birthdays to your Google Calendar

I've been patiently waiting for my gcal to update but never had any luck. I just found this article, which has a pretty good workaround:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=366b19a87d1304ec&hl=en

Ok, here's an odd little procedure that I've had partial success with -- looks like a possible incompatibility between the google ics interpreter and the fbCal ics formatting. Perhaps this will be useful to fbCal/Google as a diagnostic.

(1) set up the calendar in Google as you normally would using fbCal ("F");
(2) go into the settings for F, and click on the fbcalendar.com url, which will cause you to download an .ics file;
(3) open this .ics file in Word or another program capable of saving in various flavors of txt (not notepad);
(4) save it as text, and when asked what type of text, select Windows (I don't know offhand what the equivalents would be under Mac or Linux; sorry --basically you've got to get line breaks represented in a particular way there);
(5) rename the extension to .ics,
(6) create a new calendar in google and upload the modified .ics file into that calendar (you probably don't want to upload it into an existing calendar, or you'll make a mess)

That should do it as far as getting it into google; of course, it's manual, and kind of a pain, and would have to be periodically updated as you get new FB friends.

I don't know yet whether the this manually-created calendar will then sync to my iphone, but if there's a problem, that's another issue.

This post was also there toward the bottom (dated July 2 2009), which leaves me with a glimmer of hope:

I sent an email to the developer of fbCal & here was his reply:

=========================
Thank you for reporting. Yes there is a problem with Google Calendar and we are in touch with them. The Google team was able to reproduce the error and is working on it to fix it. They told us not to change anything on our side as it was Google Calendar related. I know it does not help you very much, but we cannot do anything else at the moment. We are waiting for their feedback. Frédéric
=========================

So, Google is aware of it, its just a waiting game now.