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Facebook Friend Mapper

Map Example

Create a map of your facebook friends! Useful for when you're passing through a city and can't remember all the people you want to grab coffee with.

First: A Warning

When using this tool, Facebook can see that you're using an automated tool, which violates their terms. There is a risk that Facebook may decide to put a temporary or permanent ban on your account (though I haven't heard of this happening to anyone yet). I am not responsible for this or any other outcomes that may occur as a result of the use of this software.

What this is

This tool will only extract the data that your friends have already explicitly made it available to you. If the amount or content of the data freaks you (like it did to me!), then it's a good reminder for us all to check our profiles/privacy settings to make sure that we only share what we want others to be able to see.

It works like this:

  1. Open your friends list page (on m.facebook.com) and save to db/friend_list.html
  2. Download your friend's profiles (on mbasic.facebook.com) to db/profiles/
  3. Parse profiles for 'Current City' or 'Address' and add to location list.
  4. Find the lat/long for each location (using Mapbox API) and save to db/points.geojson.
  5. Creates friends-map.html, a self-contained, moveable, searchable map of your friends all over the world!

All data is saved locally in db/data.db as a sqlite database.

Installation

Prerequisites:

  • Make sure that python 3 and pipenv are installed.
  • Create a free Mapbox API key. You'll need this so the tool can geocode city names into coordinates to use on the map.

Then:

  1. Clone this repository
  2. cd into the cloned folder
  3. Run pipenv install to install dependencies

Using the tool

  1. Run pipenv shell to activate the virtual environment. This is optional if you already have the required packages installed in your environment.
  2. Run python make.py. On the first run, it'll ask for your Facebook username/password and Mapbox API Key. It saves these to the local .env file for use in subsequent runs (eg if you add more friends).
  3. The tool will then index your friend list, download friend's profiles, geocode coordinates, and create the map. You can optionally use any of these flags to perform only certain actions:
  • --list Sign in, download friends list HTML
  • --index Extract friend list HTML to database
  • --download Download profile for each friend in index
  • --parse Extract profiles HTML to database
  • --map Geocode addresses & make the map!
  • --json Export sqlite database to JSON files (db/json/)

If something breaks, just run the script again. It's built to pick up where it left off at all stages. Please file an issue if you run into any problems. Enjoy!