Getting a facebook profile picture from an email address

Question

I\'m trying to get a user\'s facebook profile picture based on their email address. Effectively, I want to offer my users the option between using Gravatar for their image,

Answer 1

There doesn't seem to be an official way to do what you are asking. It seems like facebook has made this closed on purpose, probably something to do with privacy. Its actually really easy to do this in a few screen-scraping steps though:

1. Visit http://www.facebook.com/#!/search.php?q=#{USERS_EMAIL_ADDRESS}&type=all&init=srp

2. If page returns "No results found for your query.", then they don't have a profile.

3. Otherwise, the page will contain a thumbnail of the user for that email address. (something like http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs227.ash2/48219_72120057_3223_q.jpg)

I could write a sinatra app to do this in about 5 minutes, if anyone would like me to.

But I think gravatar and facebook should just be friends.