Viettel, Vietnam's military-owned telecom, has opened up direct Facebook integration via sms to Viettel mobile phone subscribers. This is an officially supported way for Vietnamese people to access Facebook on the go without a computer or smartphone. This is targeting Vietnamese people who mainly access the internet at internet cafes and so using this they won't need to hang around at cafes where they're charged hourly while they wait for someone to comment or like their status updates. This applies to a lot of Vietnamese folks and could lead to even faster adoption of Vietnam's #1 social network. What does that imply about any official government ban on Facebook?

Did you know that Facebook was tracking all the links you clicked? If you've ever tried to copy a link from Facebook to another site then you'd see that the link always started with www.facebook.com which is how they track what pages you're visiting.

In Vietnam, this is more than just a privacy problem. Because Facebook access intermittently requires workarounds to connect, those links can be useless even if we can see the actual website URL right there. This is because, by showing you the real website URL, Facebook makes you think they aren't doing anything tricky by adding a tracking ID to the URL and forcing you to go through Facebook to browse to the site.

So what can you do to make your life easier as well as private?

Install the Facebook Link Tracking Disabler free from the Chrome Web Store.

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Bonus: Are you tired of people using Facebook apps to post news stories which then require you to install the app to actually read the article? If you haven't already filtered all of those out of your feed then you should at least install the Facebook Article Grabber extension to convert those stories into real URLs.

Today I was playing around with Facebook's where you can test out their API.

First, you may want to logout of Facebook using the button there and log back in in order to get the "FB.login callback" Log message on the sidebar. Inside that, you'll see something like:

{
   "authResponse": {
      "accessToken": "AAAAAKvQdWksBAG8yLhVwqWyvgF2uu2eUahBQTZCPD5y2ilo2qZBbyjJ3DJRXDn4UONrVqAK28ZCSlouAtvdbxCc0ZAzQ0e8VbZBZCsdHmzUQZDZD",
      "userID": "12463924",
      "expiresIn": 5200,
      "signedRequest": "_ltfzUYHjPHyFZH6JnlbzVa-oejnPTud9aHK24eIWOc.eyJhbGdvcml0aG0iOiJITUFDLVNIQTI1NiIsImNvZGUiOiJBUUR2WU4tcTk4cW04X2xwbkg0LVU4Rk9YMUoxYVBmOUNMQkJPeEhlSGowQUZ3a2V6akRNWDlPNGExbkhkREZxT2laQVhWZW50aDRfd19EUk5uWm95NFlDYXFqWktweDZ1MDA5U2Fkc2hSUjQtWUdfUi05S21zY3F5RXlPTC1zbGRaVHBqZkRZS0lvdzFxYnJ2SjJteWxXYkd1dWFhY1h6U1FUWW8tc1V2Rm1oTU5fLV9xZzNxOXRadHJTSi1WdFRpUWciLCJpc3N1ZWRfYXQiOjEzMjE1NDc2MDAsInVzZXJfaWQiOiIxMjQ2MzkyNCJ9"
   },
   "status": "connected"
}

You should copy the accessToken in order to do further testing which requires a token. Most of the new API calls can be tested right in your browser. For example:

https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=Tomo&type=user&access_token=AAAAAKvQdWksBAG8yLhVwqWyvgF2uu2eUahBQTZCPD5y2ilo2qZBbyjJ3DJRXDn4UONrVqAK28ZCSlouAtvdbxCc0ZAzQ0e8VbZBZCsdHmzUQZDZD&limit=10&offset=0

That searches my account for users with the name 'Tomo', while using my token to authenticate. The token doesn't last very long and has definitely expired by the time you read this.

Now plug this code into the textarea.

<div id="profile_pics">
Profile pics here
</div>
<script>

// From an example

var profilePicsDiv = document.getElementById('profile_pics');
FB.getLoginStatus(function(response) {
  if (response.status != 'connected') {
    profilePicsDiv.innerHTML = '<em>You are not connected</em>';
    return;
  }



// JSON output from https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=Tomo&type=user&access_token=AAAAAKvQdWksBAG8yLhVwqWyvgF2uu2eUahBQTZCPD5y2ilo2qZBbyjJ3DJRXDn4UONrVqAK28ZCSlouAtvdbxCc0ZAzQ0e8VbZBZCsdHmzUQZDZD&limit=10&offset=0
var people = {
   "data": [
      {
         "name": "Tomo Coffee",
         "id": "100001851101897"
      },
      {
         "name": "Tomo Kiku",
         "id": "626405318"
      },
      {
         "name": "Tomomi Shiho",
         "id": "1755956208"
      },
      {
         "name": "Tomoman Bkk",
         "id": "1674446551"
      },
      {
         "name": "Tomori Moore",
         "id": "511540368"
      },
      {
         "name": "Tomomi Takihara",
         "id": "100001600551550"
      },
      {
         "name": "Tomohiro Morinaga",
         "id": "713242010"
      },
      {
         "name": "Onda Tomoyuki",
         "id": "100001455563427"
      },
      {
         "name": "Tomoko Okawara",
         "id": "100001514576923"
      },
      {
         "name": "Tomonari Kino",
         "id": "804330331"
      }
   ],
   "paging": {
      "next": "https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=Tomo&type=user&access_token=AAAAAKvQdWksBAG8yLhVwqWyvgF2uu2eUahBQTZCPD5y2ilo2qZBbyjJ3DJRXDn4UONrVqAK28ZCSlouAtvdbxCc0ZAzQ0e8VbZBZCsdHmzUQZDZD&limit=10&offset=10"
   }
}


var searchid = '1218273364';
var markup = '';

function genfn(i) {
    var fn = function(result) {
        //console.log(i); console.log(result); 
        for (var j = 0; j < result.length; j++) {
            if (result[j] == searchid) {
                Log.info('foaf search match', people.data[i]);
                markup = (
                  '<fb:profile-pic size="square" ' +
                          'uid="' + people.data[i].id + '" ' +
                          'facebook-logo="true"' +
                          '></fb:profile-pic>'
                );
                var profilePicsDiv = document.getElementById('profile_pics');
                profilePicsDiv.innerHTML += markup;
                FB.XFBML.parse(profilePicsDiv);
            }
        }
    };
    return fn;
}

for (var i = 0; i < people.data.length; i++) {
    person = people.data[i];
    FB.api({method: 'friends.getMutualFriends', target_uid : person.id}, genfn(i));
}

});

</script>

As you can see, I prefetched the results from searching "Tomo" and I set the id of a friend whose "Tomo" friends I wanted to find. This searches the results and filters for people who have the mutual friend 1218273364.

To go further, one should have controls for choosing the search term, automatically fetch search results and page through them to find more results, and have a control for choosing the mutual friend. This will allow you to search for mutual friends even if you don't have permission to view a friend's friends. Turning this into an app or Chrome extension is left as an exercise to the reader. :)

With the recent instability in Facebook access and some people reporting it blocked on one ISP or area of Vietnam while others can access it just fine... Is it time for you to rethink your choice in internet service provider?

There are a dozen or so ISPs in Vietnam but I've only looked at the biggest: Viettel, VNPT, FPT, SPT, and Netnam. They also all provide fiber internet (FTTH - fiber to the home) and not just ADSL. Here are their prices for selected packages: