This is a tip for Facebook and Address Book users. iPhone owners know that Facebook added a neat feature awhile ago to that allows you to sync your friend's profile pictures with your contact information right within the Facebook app. This way, when a friend calls you, their facebook profile picture displays on your screen. If you weren't aware, you can go to your friends list within the iPhone app and at the top right is a button called "Sync", tap on that and from there is it pretty self-explanatory.
However, I was looking for this same functionality long before the Facebook dev team added it to their app. I came across an application called AddressBookSync. It does essentially the same thing but with some great bonuses Facebook sync doesn't provide. It scans your Address Book contact list and matches it up against your Facebook friends list and grabs information from Facebook and adds it to your Address Book. This is all pretty standard, but one cool bonus is that you can also manually link up contacts with their Facebook profiles. For example, I am on Facebook under my nickname so anyone trying to sync my contact information would have to have me in their phone under my nickname (which most do anyway, but that's besides the point). If they don't have me in their Address Book under my nickname, no connection is made and none of my information is transferred, so the ability to manually tell Address Book that Matt Kreikemeier and Goon Kreikemeier are the same person is pretty nice.
The other absolute awesome thing is that it grabs your friend's birthday information if they have it listed! This is such a great feature. I didn't know it would do that, I wasn't expecting it to do that, but when it did it was a great surprise. It scans all my friends and anyone that has their birthday listed now shows up in my calendar in iCal or BusyCal under the Birthdays calendar. You just have to make sure that you are subscribed to the Birthdays calendar within the iCal preferences. If you need direction on this, just leave a comment and I'll let you know. Imagine the surprise when I opened up BusyCal and all of the sudden all of my friend's birthdays were scattered about on my calendar. I have a terrible memory and this has been a great way to remember birthdays without having to go through and add everyone manually.
AddressBookSync is free and you can download it from their website.
One Comment
Jessica
Just wanted to tell you how helpfull you were! Awsome!