[Sniffnoy]

Annoyingly, it seems the Graph API just can't do much of what it seems it ought to be able to. So far as I can tell, Facebook doesn't offer any convenient way for me to read my friends' information -- that I have access to, on Facebook -- by automated means. (Or other people's info that's publically available.) This means I can't write a tool that makes a contact-info-list for me; if I want to assemble a list of phone numbers, for instance, I have to do it manually. (For phone numbers in particular -- but not for other things -- Facebook used to do this on the website, but this seems to be gone.) Nor can I do simple things like, say, given two people, whose friendslist I can view, determine which friends they have in common. Facebook lets me see mutual friends of me and another person, but not two other people. These are basic tools I should be able to write, but last I checked, the capability just wasn't there.

[tedunangst]

I'm somewhat pleased friends' phone numbers aren't available. It means you don't have to worry about a friend clicking "Click here to backup your phone numbers" scams. Your inability to extract data about your friends is a kind of privacy feature. Automated access to your data, good; automated access to other people's data, bad.

[qznc]

I wrote myself a script, which does this via screen-scraping once. Of course, this is a shaky solution. On the other hand, it does not require me to request an ID from Facebook or give permissions to any third-party app.