Routing Around Vietnam's Facebook Block Via Apps

tomo — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 05:04:43 +0000

[This is the third post about Accessing Facebook in Vietnam]

Lately, ISPs in Vietnam has begun randomly blocking Facebook again after a period of openness. When it's blocked, even accessing Facebook via their Lisp4 server (or using the Saigonist DNS server) doesn't work.

But there are a number of apps, both web-based and desktop apps, which integrate with Facebook to different extents. These apps, once you login to them with your Facebook account, can basically get your Facebook updates for you without requiring access to Facebook.

One such app is Seesmic, which has both a web and a desktop client. Seesmic connects to a numer of social networks and I use it for reading my Twitter feed, with a custom hack to fix a serious problem with disappearing Tweets. But once you login to Seesmic and connect it to your Facebook account, you can see your Facebook feed as well as messages. That's enough for most people, most of the time.

Other desktop apps that can connect to Facebook are Bubbles and Hootsuite, but I wasn't able to get Hootsuite to connect to my Facebook account.

Another less convenient way is to use Opera's online demo of their Opera Mini browser. It's a Java app and you use it like you're using a phone, but it will connect to Facebook for you (unless your browser doesn't let Java make network connections).

When I saw that Diesel released a desktop app called Excellbook as part of a marketing campaign called Be Stupid At Work, I was hoping it would also work in bypassing the Facebook block. It's an Adobe AIR app, which requires installing Adobe AIR, and is generally a piece of crap. Even if you can get it to connect, it will require a connection to Facebook still and so it's not so useful. Nice idea, terrible execution and yet another example of a bad Adobe AIR app.

excelbook

Routing Around Vietnam's Facebook Block Via Apps