Exporting and seeing all your old Facebook statuses
If you would like to try out my application to export your old Facebook statuses, click here – once you’ve given the application the right permissions, a CSV file will be downloaded. It’s very much in beta, so please leave me feedback.
I am currently testing out a little Facebook application I’ve written to export and save all my old status updates (I’m surprised no-one else has done this?). I am only able to pull out ones since August last year – not all of them, even though they are stored in Facebook.
I recently saved all my old Facebook statuses in an incredibly painful way* – which made me realise how un-user-friendly it is to look back in time on Facebook. There’s no “browse by month” navigation like on many blogs. While there is a feed of your latest Facebook statuses, it only shows your last 10 statuses.
* I clicked on my profile page, then painfully kept clicking “Older posts” until I finally got back to when I joined Facebook in early 2007 and then saved this massive webpage to my computer (~10MB).
does it include archiving the comments in the statuses?
No, unfortunately we cannot find a way in the API to do this. Would be fantastic though!
I tried this (which is something I’ve been looking for for a while) and the csv it returned also only went back to August 2008 (26th) – 357 updates. It also didn’t seem to pick up all my updates (there seemed no pattern to this).
I’d second the comment about comments as well.
I tried today…
It is not working…
What happened for you max?
I have a mac and I downloaded an empty xls file
Can you try again? (I’m on a Mac too, so that won’t be the issue I don’t think.)
I tried again…
I see only:
Timestamp,Status
What browser are you using? Have you tried restarting? I’m not sure why that’s happening for you.
I was just saying today it would be cool if you could export all your statuses — and then display them in a calendar format… any way to do that?
I use Safari. I tried to restart… no news…
I tried again right now and… it works! Unexplainable….
And I can see my “last” 1497 status…. GREAT!
YAY!
Hi Sara,
I wrote mine into a diary manually (!) for fun.
You can do it with Twitter: http://www.recipester.org/Recipe:Add_your_Twitter_updates_into_Google_Calendar_27125999
… so it’d be possible to write some code to do that for these too I expect.
I’m trying it too and only seeing “Timestamp,Status” as well… any ideas? Should I restart Firefox or my entire computer?
Try restarting Firefox, I’m not sure why that happens sometimes for some people.
Perfect! thank you!
Awww. THANK YOU! This was exactly what I was needing!
It’s a shame that it doesn’t grab all of them, instead of just through August 08. But this is definitely better than the nothing FB provides!
Thanks!
Is there anyway to get statuses prior to Aug 2008?
I clicked on my profile page, then painfully kept clicking “Older posts” until I finally got back to when I joined Facebook in early 2007 and then saved this massive webpage to my computer (~10MB).
Honey, I love you. Exported everything from now back to my first update (Jan.5th, 2009 – when I first started using FB actively). Will recommend you to everyone.
It doesn’t seem to be giving me posts with links in them, alas. Though what it did give me was helpful…I’m on a Mac using Firefox BTW.
It’s just status updates – not posts/links that you share. I wish Facebook made it easier to grab out other things!
I’ve looked for something like this in the past, with no success. Thank you for creating this! Now for the comments
Heyyy! it worked. But you have to click “open” Instead of “save” and then just save it on your own. Thanks alot hunni <3 mwa
Also includes status updates I~ve deleted… ie typos. Is there a way to identify these so I can delete them??
[...] Facebook sucks in giving access to past updates and photos in a good way. I could find a way to download past statuses as a csv, but it has a very buggy format: http://www.socialarchivist.com/2009/08/20/exporting-all-your-old-facebook-statuses/ [...]
THANK YOU!!!!
Anyway to find out which status updates (or their dates) that are missing?
I previously used this on a PC and it worked pretty well, but I’ve just tried on a Mac (os x 10.6.2, chrome 5.0.307.11, excel 2008 12.2.3) and it is all broken up into columns strangely with odd characters/symbols etc.
David – I work on a Mac and have not experienced this issue. Can you email me the file? (rachel@cre8d-design.com)
Is there a way to export a specific friends status updates??
Not using this script, but it is possible to write a script to get a friend’s status updates. In the meantime, get your friend to download them for you?
I just completed this. Not bad! I now have all my updates from the last two-years. I’ve been on Facebook since 03, so that means I don’t have five years worth of updates. I’m wondering if they must have switched to a new database or something. How far do you think it will ever go back? I’d love to get back to 03/04.
I have tried a couple of times and just get two columns labeled timestamp and status with no data. I shut down and re-started my computer and received:
Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘FacebookRestClientException’ with message ‘This API call could not be completed due to resource limits’ in /nfs/c03/h05/mnt/51433/domains/cre8d-design.com/html/facebook/facebook-platform/php/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php:3094 Stack trace: #0 /nfs/c03/h05/mnt/51433/domains/cre8d-design.com/html/facebook/test.php(19): FacebookRestClient->call_method(’facebook.status…’, Array) #1 {main} thrown in /nfs/c03/h05/mnt/51433/domains/cre8d-design.com/html/facebook/facebook-platform/php/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php on line 3094
I’m on a mac, running Firefox
Try again later, could have been an issue with Facebook’s API at the time.
for Facebook there are several apps that can do that for you…for 2009 I used “My year in status” and it made a nice 8×8 page for me but that app is down right now for some reason and i think only does 1 yr. Also there’s http://www.facebook.com/xsmystatus that will show all your past FB and Twitter updates and you can do new updates from there as well.
the whole reason i’m ON fb is to make it easier to record the funny things my little guy says/does. thank you so much!
hey,
thank u, it was really very easy to do but unfortunately, it doesn’t support right to left languages?
is there any I can access my friends comments on my old statuses?
Thanks for the script! seems to work, but mine also only went back to august of ‘08. I actually had started to work on a similar script. was wondering if I could email you about a few coding details?
That’s fine Mike, please email me through the contact form.
Any chance that Facebook statuses could ever sync to Ical or Google Calendar? It would be awesome to be able to see what was going on in my life on a calendar
Just wondering.
Keep up the good work!
[...] Exporting All Your Old Facebook Statuses [...]
PROBLEM with Unicode:
It didn’t work for Unicode characters… sad
Hi there,
I really like the app. Been looking for something like this for ages. Everything looks fine for me in Excel.
But – the oldest update showing is from July 2008. And I joined Facebook long time before that. Hm.
And Unicode characters would be nice.
:)
Thanks for this! It’s a great app! I know you have said it’s only from August 2008 but do you know/working on getting older posts to this? I wanted from November 2007!
Hi everyone,
Again – Facebook doesn’t make the data prior to August 2008 available through their API currently. We’ve tried and tried to get data prior to this but they just don’t make it available.
I normally avoid FB apps like the plague but decided I had to try this one and it works great! Thanks!
I only got the timestamp & status column nothing in them though…..I use Firefox any suggestions?
Jackie – just try again if that happens; sorry that Facebook’s API is a bit buggy.
i just downloaded and got a spreadsheet with empty columns headed timestamp and staus???
Hooray – it worked!! I use Google Chrome for FB usually, it didn’t work there but worked right away when I used IE. I got my posts since October 2008. Still no way to go back further?
Oh wow! It worked!
There is a lot missing and I’ve had my facebook for quite some time so there is maybe a year missing on status’s. A lot of them are just not there as well. Kind of interesting to see how much my life has changed :-p
Good app. Hopefully you can fix the glitches.
I also just discovered the facebook supposedly deletes old facebook posts after awhile. That could be why.
Hi everyone,
I just released Archivedbook, a very simple website which allows to view a lot about your Facebook past: your old status updates, the messages your friends posted on your wall, and same on your friends’ profile too.
http://archivedbook.nckh.jp/
I hope you’ll like it.
Any feedback welcomed
Thx!
I too avoid FB applications like the plauge, but again, thank you soooo much, this worked for me too. It is exactly what I needed. I was using an iMac and Chrome, clicked ‘allow’ and two seconds later the excel spreadsheet back to Sept 2008 listed all my updates. Amazing and thanks for the simplicity.
[...] en dag kom jeg over et lite skript man kan kjøre for å hente ut gamle facebook-statuser. Sjekk ut Social Archivist, kjør skriptet og du får en .csv-fil (åpnes i Excel eller Numbers) med alle de statuser som [...]
Greg, I just tried your Archivedbook program. I love it! I love that you were even able to pull some of the comments people wrote & postings people wrote on my wall.
[...] Social Archivist Et script som henter ut tilgjengelige statusmeldinger på veggen din og legger dem i en hendig csv-fil. Liker veldig godt formatet på sluttproduktet, men mange meldinger manglet og den gikk ikke lenger tilbake enn 2008. [...]
Hi Rachel,
Thank you for this. What you are doing is great!
When I tried I got this after about a minute:
Request-URI Too Large
The requested URL’s length exceeds the capacity limit for this server.
Apache/2.0.54 Server at gridserver.com Port 80
Thanks a lot…it helps
greg ur waaay is ASOM!!!!!!!
OMG thank u so much
You did a great job on this! I think all my status updates are here… thank you so much!
Hey, this app is great. But I have a problem… it only exports statuses that I wrote in English. I also wrote statuses in Hebrew, but in the excel file they come out in unreadable characters.
Is there a way to export my Hebrew statuses? Please send mean answer via private message on Facebook, link added. Thanks!
Your app doesnt seem to be working for me. I tried it on a friends account and it worked but it doesnt with mine. It might help if I tell you that I update at least 3 times daily and my comments average on 50 or more per update since July 2009.
Help
Thank you so much! BTW, the first time I tried to use this, I received the timestamp message file I see a few commenters mentioned here. So I followed your link to the facebook page you made for this, then used the application from there. Now it works! So maybe it has something to do with how the application is accessed? Anyway, I, too, am keeping track of fast-growing kiddos and this was a God-send. Thank you soooooooooooooo much for making this available!!!
my excel sheet comes up empty!
perfect shot on MacOSX 10.6.3 with Safari 5
mine comes up empty too
Yeah I tried and haven’t been able to pull anything. when I tried a couple months ago it worked great, but now I only get timestamp entry and blank sheet… Sigh
Hi all -
As I said, Facebook’s API is a bit buggy. If it doesn’t work first time, try again later. Not much I can do about that unfortunately – ideally Facebook would have an export button themselves!
Thanks!
Rachel
Hi, I tried to run the export, but when I got the CSV it only had the headings (Timestamp and Status) I write A LOT of status updates. Could this be the issue?
I tried using Chrome, Safari and Firefox. All the same.
Cheers,
Mikey
Also, sometimes I get this error:
Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘FacebookRestClientException’ with message ‘This API call could not be completed due to resource limits’ in /nfs/c03/h05/mnt/51433/domains/cre8d-design.com/html/facebook/facebook-platform/php/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php:3094 Stack trace: #0 /nfs/c03/h05/mnt/51433/domains/cre8d-design.com/html/facebook/test.php(19): FacebookRestClient->call_method(’facebook.status…’, Array) #1 {main} thrown in /nfs/c03/h05/mnt/51433/domains/cre8d-design.com/html/facebook/facebook-platform/php/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php on line 3094
Empty except for headers!! Help! This sounds so cool! (I’m using OS X if that helps…)
I am just getting an empty excel spreadsheet.
For all of you that have been having trouble, you should try the program Greg mentioned in a previous posting (about 2 1/2 months ago): http://archivedbook.nckh.jp/ It works great for me & you’re even able to pull some of the comments people wrote & postings people wrote on your wall. I run the application every once in a while & then I copy & paste it in a document to save the comments.