One of my biggest, and long lasting, complaints about facebook was the closed nature of its event system. There didn’t seem to be a good way to get my facebook events into my google calendar (and thus onto my iphone calendar). It made me reluctant to ever use facebook for event planning.

However, recently I discovered that facebook does provide a standards based way to automatically get all of my events from facebook to any other standards based calendar (like Google Cal or Apple iCal, MS Outlook, etc).

  1. Login to Facebook

  2. Go to http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/?sk=events

  3. At the bottom left of the screen find the link “Export Events” and click on it. A small dialog window should appear. NOTE: the “export events” link may be elsewhere on the page by the time you read this

  4. In the dialog you will see a web address (URL) copy it.

At this point you have the info you need to connect your facebook calendar to your other calendar program. The following are instructions for adding it to Google Calendar as that is what I use.

  1. Go to Google Calendar

  2. On the bottom left of the Google Calendar screen you will see an “Add” link. Click it and pick “Add By URL”

  3. In the dialog that appears paste the web address you copied earlier

  4. Click on the “Add Calendar” button

That’s it. The calendar will be added but it will have a strange looking name. You can go to that calendars settings in Google Calendar to rename it if you wish. I renamed mine to Bills Facebook Events.