How To: Transfer Your Facebook Friends to Google+ (And Vice Versa)

On the same day that Google launched their new social network, Google +, a team of Google engineers calling themselves the Data Liberation Front announced their first service on Tuesday—Google Takeout, a product that allows users to easily move their data in and out of Google products, including Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, Profile and Stream (the equivalent of Facebook's newsfeed).

Google Takeout is a great way to take your data from Google, either for archiving or for moving to a different service. Once you recover your data, you'll be able to save it into portable formats, making it easy to import into other services, even Facebook.

You can recover all of your Google data at once, or simply choose the product you want. Then, download the zip package to your computer. Your contacts are stored as Vcards according to your Gmail or Google+ groups, your profile exports as a JSON file, and the Stream uses HTML with special microformating.

Currently, Facebook only allows its users to export their photos and their newsfeed, which can only be browsed as HTML pages. Unlike Google, they do not allow you to export profiles and your contacts' email addresses and phone numbers. And this means that there's no official tool that lets you transfer your Facebook friends over to Google Plus.

But, there is a way—with the Facebook Friend Exporter extension for Google Chrome, which adds an "Export Friends" button to the Facebook toolbar. It only adds your friends to your Google Contacts (not to your Circles), but it's one of the easiest ways out there.