Hanoi - Vietnam is a social networking paradise, a giant village of 86 million people where everyone seems to be just one or two degrees of connection away from everyone else. It is either the kind of society that designers of social networking websites like Facebook dream of, or the kind of society where nobody needs such websites at all.
For the first 10 months of this year, it looked like the former was the case. Facebook, which had struggled to find a toehold in Vietnam, took off in 2009, and now claims 3 million members. The service received a boost in July, when Yahoo shut down the Vietnamese branch of its social networking site Yahoo360.
Then, in early November, Facebook users began having trouble accessing the site. The government had ordered it blocked, employees at internet service providers said.
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