Add Facebook friends' birthdays to your calendar 13
One feature of the PalmOS calendar that has been missing in webOS since Day 1 was the automatically show birthdays and anniversaries from your contacts in your calendar. While this feature is sadly still absent in the latest webOS versions, there is a partial workaround if you have a large circle of friends who are on Facebook and you sync your Google Calendar to your webOS device (or are willing to sync one going forward).
Facebook has a built in process that allows you to create a unique URL that you can add to Google that links back to your friends' birthdays, which also has the benefit of constantly being updated as your friends update their data. To follow the steps below:
- Log on to Facebook.com
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On the left-side navigation bar, tap on "Events" - On the main Facebook Event section, scroll all the way to the bottom and click the small "Birthdays" link
- Once the page refreshes with the listing of your friends' birthdays, once again scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on the "Export Birthdays" link
- Copy the "webcal://" link that appears in the pop-up dialog box
- Go to http://www.google.com/calendar
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On the left-hand side, click the arrow next to the "Other Calendar" listing and choose "Add by URL" - Paste in the webcal:// link and press the "Add Calendar" button
This will now add a new "Facebook Friends' Birthdays" calendar to Google that will be added to your webOS device next time it syncs back to Google.
13 Comments
I tried this and all it did was add events titled "busy" at seemingly random times. Anyone else having this problem or know whats wrong?
Nevermind, figured it out. I was adding the whole events calendar rather than just the birthdays
I "believe" that when one does this, one will end up with events that are literally all day (i.e. 24 hours long), instead of an event that webos knows is all day and places a simple one line item at the top of the calendar day.
this perl script will fix that.
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $url = "";
my @data = `wget --quiet -O - "$url"`;
my $start;
print "Content-type: text/calendar\n\n";
foreach my $line (@data) {
chomp $line;
if ($line =~ /^DTSTART:(.*)$/) {
$start = $1;
}
if ($line =~ /^X-WR-CALNAME.*$/) {
print "X-WR-CALNAME:Facebook Friends' Birthdays\n";
} elsif ($line =~ /^DURATION.*$/) {
print "DTEND:$start\n";
} else {
print "$line\n";
}
}
of course this only does you good if you have a web server to run it on.
no, this sets up an "All Day" event that shows up at the top of the calendar, not a 24 hour event across the entire day
My contacts show up with their birthday, but they don't show up in my calendar.
I think what this article meant to say was that Android stole this feature from webOS years ago, HP is just getting around to implement it now.
you guys are awessome...this is nice feature to have... i guess we can add our national(read users in different countries) holidays URL from the web to google calender and make it appear in our webos device's calendar..
Without doing this, I already see "Contact's Birthdays and Events" on my calendar's phone, and it seems like Synergy has already brought to my phone all of my Facebook friends and their birthdays.
Google Calendar already has an option to display your "Contact's Birthdays". But you must have the birthday in your contacts.
1. Go to Calendar Settings
2. Then click on 'Calendars'
3. Under "Other calendars" click 'Browse interesting calendars'
4. Click on 'More' tab.
5. Click 'subscribe' next to "contacts birthdays and events".
While you're in there you may find other calendars to add.
Nice! Works perfectly. Good to keep reading these articles! Thanks very much!
Sweet! Very nice..worked the first time!
Can anyone verify, does this set an alarm event to the B-Day?
This sounds and seems to be a very good feature, so convenient! Thank you for providing this information, I'll definitely try to use it! Hope that it is as good as this mp3 ringtone maker