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And How To Find The Facebook Event Page

Last week on Lifehacker I stumbled upon a handy tip from Sean Bonner on  how to export your Facebook events into your Google calendar.

1. In Facebook, go to your EVENTS page.
2. At the top of that page click EXPORT EVENTS
3. You’ll get a pop up window with a URL, copy it.
4. In Google Cal, on the bottom left you’ll see ‘Other Calendars’ and below that a link to ADD. Click ADD
5. One of the new options you’ll be presented with is ADD BY URL, select that
6. Paste the URL from Facebook where it asks for it.
7. Fin

It’s really easy.  Unbelievably easy until you try and find the Facebook Events page.  It turns out that there are many Facebook Events pages and not all of them have an export link.  I assumed that the Events page in question is the one accessible from the Events tab on my Profile page,

but when you go to that page there is no export link to be found.

So then I tried the page for one of the events themselves.  Perhaps along with the event details there would be the “export events” link that I was searching for.  I knew that this made little sense, but since some elements of the Event page is personalized for me when I view it maybe the link would be there.  It turns out that I was half correct.  On the Event page there is an export link, but it is for exporting that individual event as an iCalendar file that you can then import into your calendar.  That was helpful, but I didn’t want to have to do this import export dance for every Facebook event.  I was looking for a promised solution that would import all of my Facebook events forever and that I would only have to do once.

Finally, a couple days after I had given up on finding the link, I figured that maybe the hack was outdated and the functionality was lost in an earlier Facebook layout update, I noticed the events box in my Home page right hand column. I clicked “See All” and lo and behold another Events page revealed itself to me. That’s right, a second Events page and on this one, in the upper right corner there was a link to “Export Events”.

I clicked it and it opened the pop up window that I was in search of.  I copied the link, pasted into Google Calendar and the hack worked perfectly.

UPDATE: This post was written before the latest Facebook layout was rolled out.  The new layout appears to have removed the export events link.  This issue has been reported to Facebook and as soon as I am aware of a fix I will update this post with that information.

I’m writing this for two reasons.  The first is so that if anyone else can’t find the right Events Page on Facebook to run this little hack hopefully this post will guide them there.  The other is to say “Hey Facebook, I know that you are rolling out some layout changes this week.  I’m not sure that changes to the Events pages are one of them or not, but Facebook you have a usability issue here.  If it’s resolved next week, thank you.  If it isn’t then heads up you have a usability issues with your Events page. First, you have two of them, which is not a good thing when it comes to website usability.  Second, they have different features on each page. And finally, a handy bit of functionality is missing from the Events page that you’d think would be the most personalized.   I’d be much obliged if you could clean this up.  Thanks.”

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