Hacking Facebook Places in NZ
First FB checkin from New Zealand?
Facebook Places hasn’t launched where I am yet … New Zealand. It is however running in the UK, where I normally am, and many of my friends are making full use of it, and I’m a little bit jealous.
I haven’t made any serious attempts at application hacking since I was at school, but wondered if I could fool Facebook into allowing me to check in within NZ.
I think I’ve made it halfway, and I have possibly been the first person to check in anywhere in New Zealand. I’ve successfully created an entry for where I am in the Places database, and I think I’m checked-in there, although this is proving hard to verify.
So how did I get this far?
Trial and error with a VPN really, a mini-hack.
I connect to my London-based VPN and use the touch.facebook.com site to log in (Places only works on the Touch site, or with the iPhone app, and only in areas where it has launched).
I then played around switching between browsers and flicking the VPN connection on and off.
This seemed to confuse either Facebook or my browser because when I tried to add a new location, it pulled up a map of New Zealand with my approximate location!
And then I pressed the check-in button, and for good measure I also ‘liked’ my new location.
There’s no word on when Places will come to NZ for real, so this may be as close as we get to it here for a while.
