Get your Facebook events on Outlook and your Mobile Device
Let’s face it, Facebook has become a hub of daily activity for a large number of people, including me. This is specially true for university where birthdays and socials are organised over Facebook and if you’re anywhere as obsessed as me about having an organised calendar, you would have noticed the lack of a true solution to have that information automatically imported in your calendar and more importantly mobile device. This is because most mobile phone sync solutions only allow you to sync one calendar to your phone and while you may be able get an internet calendar running in Outlook you can’t update it on your device. I tried copying event information from internet calendar to local calendar but that would mean doing it periodically and it beats the purpose.
Fortunately, there is a, tricky but working, solution to that problem. In this scenario I’m going to use Outlook, Google Calendar and a Nokia E90.
Step 1: Go onto www.fbcal.com and give it the appropriate rights to your facebook account. Upon doing that you will be shown a box which looks like the image below:
Step 2: Log onto your Google calendar. Under Other Calendars select Add and in the popup menu click 
‘Add by URL’. Under the public calendar address box which comes up, paste the URL we copied from the fbCal page. On doing that you will see a calendar titled ‘fbCal Events’ under Other Calendars and these will list all your Facebook events with all the details included. Extremely nifty.
Step 3: Download and install the free version of gSyncit. This is required to sync Google calendar to Outlook. I tried using Google’s own utility to sync outlook and google calendar but it will only let me sync the default calendars on both ends so it isn’t useful to us. After installation right click the gSyncit system tray icon and bring up settings. Under Calendar feeds delete the default options and click New to start a new setup.
Enter your username and password and select Verify account so a list of your calendars can be retrieved. Click the Select button next to the Google Calendar Feed Path and choose ‘fbCal Events‘ as the calendar. Similiarly choose your default Outlook calendar in the option below.
In the next tab reading ‘Sync Options’ make sure you uncheck ‘Outlook to Google’ and check ‘Google to Outlook’. This is because we want it to be a one way sync as the fbCal event calendar is an internet subscription. Feel free to setup the rest of the options - including the date range - however you please.
Now that you have done that, right click the GSyncit icon and select Sync to have all the Facebook events popup in your default calendar.
Step 4: Sync your mobile phone with your outlook calendar however you were doing it. For Nokia you have the PC Suite and for Windows Mobile phones you have Activesync. Since all the appointments (including Facebook Events ) are now in the default calendar you should have no problems syncing.
Step 5: Enjoy your organised-calendarised life.
On a finishing note, if you are to pay the 10$ for the commercial version of GSyncit you will be able to sync multiple calendars. This is useful since you will also be able to add Facebook Birthdays to your calendar and as such never forget a Friend’s birthday again.
Tags: calendar, facebook, google, nokia, outlook