Update – March 2010: A recent change with either Facebook or fbCal has caused problems when accessing the calendar links from your iPhone. There is a workaround for this, however. Visit fbCal.com on your PC, and copy the iCal links that you want. They should start with “webcal://”. Paste them into an email, and then send that to yourself. On your iPhone, open the email and tap the links, and the iPhone should prompt you to load the calendars. Easy! 
The calendar on my iPhone (and on my computer, for that matter) gets very little use. I don’t really do much to warrant using it much, other then a few reminders each week, birthdays, and Library Loans (which is added in by Delicious Library). So, overall, not much. However, I would like to be able to see more birthdays on my phone then the 5 or so that I had added myself, manually. So, how? Well, simple. Facebook. As I have plenty of friends on Facebook, there’s a nice selection of birthdays that I can access via my iPhone. Or…not. I was going to try and use the built in “Export events” function in the standard Events app on Facebook, push that to Google Calendar, and then use CalDAV on my iPhone to access it, however, that doesn’t include birthdays, so it wouldn’t have worked for what I wanted. Luckily, I found another very simple solution.
After a little bit of Googling, I came across a Facebook application called fbCal. Once you give the app permission, it’ll then present you with a simple screen with a number of choices. From here, you can subscribe to events, download a static copy, or even get an RSS feed. Useful! Getting everything set up is very easy too. To make it easy, you might want to do everything from your iPhone directly.
Continue reading ‘Getting Facebook Birthdays onto your iPhone’
