I came from Vietnam, a country where information is controlled by the government. Frankly speaking, newspaper and the news on TV or radio are the 2 main sources that citizen could get information from. Therefore, we did not have any other means to clarify that whether we were fed with faked information or not.

In 2005, Yahoo introduced Yahoo! 360° to Vietnam and everything changed. Yahoo! 360° was a phenomenon which presented  to Vietnamese a brand new era of information. Most of people who had internet connection quickly experienced this type of social network. Those who had ability to write, analyse and express their ideas became “blogger” and the rest became “blog reader”. As a result, people started to discuss and debate their perspective about a specific work, mentioned in a blog, more open. They talked about a review of something like a book, a movie and so on from ordinary people, not just only from experts or journalists like before. And soon enough, political issues which is supervised by the “higher-up” began to spread at an unstoppable speed. Moreover, a number of bloggers achieved a high status in blogging community no matter how their status in real life was. There were also unofficial fan clubs for a popular bloggers. They were ready to fight back someone dared to comment negatively.

Then, in 2007, Yahoo decided to stop supporting for Yahoo! 360° because American did not  pay much attention to this site. However, it was significantly successful in Vietnam and Yahoo even developed another version called Yahoo 360 Plus for Vietnamese. Suddenly, Yahoo officially shut down the blog in 2009 and caused panic in blogger community since many people considered it as their “food”. For the first time, we witnessed how real life was affected strongly by such a social Web site.

To sum up, although Yahoo! 360° only lasted for 4 years but it made a huge impact on Vietnamese community. Like it or not, we should never underestimate the power of social network.