Sync Facebook Events and Birthdays to iPhone Calendar (for FREE!)
Between my work life, home life, social life and band… I now look after close to 15 email accounts and I think it’s 5 calendars. When ever I get asked “can you make that date” it takes me some time to find out the answer to that simple question…
The answer (I think), is that I live on my iPhone (much the the dismay of my wife) and with this in mind, why not have an all in one solution?
Current Solutions:
As I already have my Google (home and band) calendar synced to my phone the next step is to sync my Facebook (Social and band) calendar to it. After searching for an easy answer… there seemed there was none. There are a number of apps in the app store (as you would expect) but me being me, I don’t want to pay for the privilage – but more importantly I don’t want my personal details in yet another app.
There are a number of websites that give the ability to sync the Facebook calendars to iPhone but again, it’s giving your personal details to yet another website / 3rd party.
The Solution…
My iPhone is running iOS 4.3.5 and after some looking around, I discovered it offers the ability to add not only email accounts but calendars as well. How I hear you ask?
First of all, you need to find the Facebook Events iCal url (using my laptop and iPhone separately).
To do this:
- Using my web browser navigate to Facebook
- Select “Events”
- (When the page has loaded) Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Export”
- In the popup, you will see some standard information and the iCal link
- Copy the iCal link to an email and email to to an account on the phone (picture right)
- When the phone receives the email, copy the URL to the clipboard
- Navigate to and select the “settings” icon on your iPhone.
- Select “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
- Select”Add Account…” under “Accounts”
- Select “Other” at the bottom
- Select “Add Subscribed Calendar”
- Select the “Server” box and tap “Paste”
- Select “Next”
- Optionally modify the description
- Select “Done” when you are done…
- Navigate to your chosen calendar app and take a look at it .
The process is exactly the same for Facebook Birthdays so follow with ease!
I hope this was useful and easy to understand. Please note, this is how I chose to tackle the situation and I welcome other peoples suggestions on this.
Thanks
