If you are one of those who keep forgetting birthdays, then you need to take a little tech help from your social network and your smartphone. Social networks such as Facebook and Orkut are great in reminding you about your contacts’ birthdays. But you may not login to your Facebook or Orkut account daily. So a better approach would be to import your contacts’ birthdays into your mobile phone’s calendar.
You need to only follow a couple of steps to get your contacts’ birthdays out of your online social network into your mobile phone calendar. The main task here is getting the data out of the social network in a standard calendar format such as iCal or CSV. While this can also be done manually, doing it for a large contact list can be a tedious process.
Facebook does not allow you to directly export your contacts’ birthdays to any calendar. You will need to install popular Facebook applications such as Birthday Calendar to your Facebook profile to do so. In the past exporting data out of Facebook’s walled garden has resulted in users’ accounts being deleted, hence there is a certain amount of risk involved. However note that these Facebook applications available within Facebook have millions of users currently using them.
Once you have your birthdays in the form of a csv calendar file you can then import them in Microsoft Outlook and subsequently use your phone’s sync feature to synchronise your phone calendar with Microsoft Outlook directly (for Windows Mobile phones) or using Nokia PC Suite (for Nokia phones) or Apple iTunes (for iPhone).
That’s about it. Your mobile phone calendar now has your Facebook contacts’ birthdays stored within and will display them and remind you on those dates through your phone’s home screen !!
Orkut
Orkut has recently enabled an option to export your contacts birthdays to Google Calendar. Until now you could only export them to your iGoogle page. But now you can use the newly added “view your friends’ birthdays in Google calendar” link on your Orkut profile to export your contacts’ birthdays to your Google calendar.
If your mobile phone supports the calendar synchronising feature of the recently launched Google Sync, you can sync your phone calendar directly with Google Calendar. Or you can sync Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook initially and subsequently sync Outlook with your mobile phone.
Update: 14/03/2009: As rightly pointed out by Deepak Jain, Google Calendar restricts syncing of calendar entries to only your main calendar and does not sync the Orkut Birthdays calendar entries with Outlook. Hopefully, Google will rectify this problem in the future. Thanks Deepak for pointing this out.
Currently only Blackberry devices allow syncing of multiple Google Calendars with the phone directly. So if you do not have a Blackberry then you are out of luck as far as syncing of Orkut Birthdays with your mobile is concerned.
