Clever hack! Reminiscent of RMS: "I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me"
I wrote a VPN-over-Facebook tunnel a week or two ago with basically the same motivation. Stupid and slow as hell, but I still want to try it out with the $12 data plan sometime.
Blindly assuming that it operates using the simplest thing that could possibly work, it's just capturing the viewport a few seconds after the page is "done" rendering. It would likely only show whatever content is loaded without scrolling.
I'm not about to go confirm this myself, as, well, Facebook.
I had almost the same idea. Here there is something called facebook zero which is available at 0.facebook.com, it's facebook without images but it is free for T-Mobile users.
There would be a possibility to do some browsing if a user sends a query message to a page/other user-bot which then downloads the information and responds in a fb text message. Like that google sms feature.
Fortunately I have internet on my phone so this is not really a need anymore :)
Clever idea. The best would be making the same kind of bot for private messages, and open-source it so people can deploy their own "proxys" on Facebook.
This reminds me of the oldschool days when you only had e-mail but no internet and you would talk to email bot requesting web pages which were sent to you via e-mail.
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I'm not about to go confirm this myself, as, well, Facebook.
There would be a possibility to do some browsing if a user sends a query message to a page/other user-bot which then downloads the information and responds in a fb text message. Like that google sms feature.
Fortunately I have internet on my phone so this is not really a need anymore :)