A Google Chrome extension that allows you to easily export your Facebook friends' birthday dates to your Calendar tool of choice.
Simple as it should be.

Download

Quite a few years ago, I was a daily user of Facebook. As you know, Facebook was the largest social media platform in the world. A bit naively, I admit, I found it cool that it conveniently reminded you of your friends' birthdays. Sure it wasn't for engagement.

Over the years, I moved away from Facebook but I would still login from time to time, particularly to check on my friends' birthdays. I thought it would be cool to have a tool that would allow me to export my friends' birthdays to my Google Calendar so that I could send a message or give a call to my friends on their special day.

That's how birthdays.social was born.

Frequently asked questions

You may of course have a few legitimate questions about the extension. Here I am to try and answer them :)

The extension just needs you to be logged in with your Facebook account on your Desktop Chrome browser. It will check the friends' birthdays page on Facebook and will collect the data for you automatically so that it can be easily exported.
You will see how new Chrome tabs are being opened while the data is being collected... just leave your browser alone ;) and wait for the extension to get the job done.
It depends on the number of friends you have and of course the hardware you have. To give you an idea, it takes about 10 minutes on an Apple M1 to collect the data for a user with 500 friends.
Sure, one of the features of the extension is that, once the data is collected on your browser by the extension, you can easily select which friends' birthdays you want to export.
Please bear in mind that some people have their birthdays set to private on their Facebook profile. The extension will not be able to collect those birthdays. That is why most probably you see a smaller number of birthdays than the amount of friends you have on Facebook.
Since the extension depends on the structure of the Facebook pages, it may not work if Facebook changes it. If you're having trouble, please let me know and I'll be pleased to solve the issue so that it works again for other people too. Just be patient as I'm doing this on my free time :)
No. Unlike social media platforms, it is not my business to keep your data. Your data is yours.
The extension only makes use of the local storage of your browser to store the data temporarily and for you to be able to download it as a file in a Calendar-friendly format, which is the whole purpose of this personal project.
No. The extension runs on your browser and doesn't interact with your friends in any way. It just reads publicly available data.
If your friend is wondering how did you remember their birthday, just tell them you have a great memory or, even better, that you have a cool extension that helps you remember important dates ;)
Google Calendar has an option to import an .ics file into an existing calendar.
My recommendation is to create a new calendar, name it 'Facebook friends' for instance, and import the .ics file into it. You can import the file you downloaded from the extension to Google Calendar, selecting the newly created 'Facebook friends' calendar as its recipient. This way, you will be able to configure notifications, colour, appearence and other stuff for all those birthdays.
If you're using another Calendar tool, you should look for an option to import an .ics file.
I took this as a personal project to learn how to create a Chrome extension. I have no experience writing extensions for other browsers but that's something I'd like to explore, especially Firefox as it seems like another robust ecosystem for browser extensions.
When I came up with the idea the use case I had in mind was Facebook. Then I thought probably Linkedin was another good one, but birthday dates are not readily available there (or I haven't found other than the few upcoming birthdays). Feel free to drop me other suggestions and I'll be happy to explore them.

Got feedback?

Do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have any feedback or questions

You must accept the cookies notice in order to send a message

Alternatively, feel free to contact me via hi@birthdays.social