In May 2010, Facebook (in collaboration with many mobile/cell service providers) launched 0.facebook.com – a completely free to access, mobile version, of Facebook.
There are absolutely no data charges applied when surfing 0.facebook.com! Unfortunately it is a somewhat limited experience considering it doesn’t allow access to any pictures. You can still post status updates, comments, messages and so on.
I planned to go the whole hog and create a fully working proxy which uses 0.facebook.com to funnel the traffic through. The plan was to develop a server app and a client app which runs on the cell phone. Eventually, however, I settled on a simpler, proof of concept, proxy.
There’s a Facebook note which is constantly monitored and updated based on user comments. For example, if you comment *bbc then the note is updated automatically with the contents of the BBC news feed. If you enter japan then the note is automatically updated with the contents of the Japan Wikipedia page.
(The reason I chose to use notes/comments instead of private messages is because of overly restrictive limits Facebook applies to the number of private messages you can send in a short period of time.)
To use the proxy, you simply bookmark a notes page of a user who’s account is being constantly monitored by a remote server, via the Facebook graphs API. Each time you add a comment to that note, the remote server reads it, collects the information you want and then updates the note with that information.
Now, to proxy requests through 0.facebook.com, you simply visit the bookmarked page and add a comment.
For example, if I want to see the Wikipedia page for Osaka (Japan) then I’ll add a comment to the note page which reads: osaka
After a second or two, you can refresh the page and see that the note has been updated with Wikipedia data about Osaka. 
If you had the time and know how, you could easily use this same method to create a fully functioning proxy, allowing you to surf any website for free by funnelling the data through 0.facebook.com.
You’d need to create an application to run on the cell phone which looks like a normal browser but actually makes requests for pages via Facebook comments and receives the data for those requests by reading a Facebook note.
Since development for cell phones isn’t really my thing,I haven’t taken the time to do this. If anyone out there develops cell phone applications (especially for Nokia phones) and want’s to take this to the next level, send me an email! 
No comments:
Post a Comment