North Korea: Will you be my Facebook friend?

Despite my best efforts, I cannot make a single Facebook friend in Pyongyang, North Korea. Twelve different Facebook users listed as living in Pyongyang are current ignoring my user-to-user messages requesting a chat about Facebooking in the world's most reclusive nation.

I became fixated on interviewing a Facebook user in Pyongyang — North Korean or otherwise — to illustrate Facebook's pervasiveness for this story on Asia's Facebook explosion. I couldn't pull it off. There are only about 100 Pyongyang-listed profiles out there and most appear facetious. My sole response came from a South Korean, who offered this apology: "I'm so sorry … this is only a joke to my close friends … I didn't mean to disturb people like you."

One profile, listed as a female student at North Korea's Hamhung University, cites "I feel like nuking America" under her interests and, under books, "Why is South Korea an Idiotic, Retarded Capitalist." (Not carried by Amazon.com.) But most of her "friends" are Anime cartoon characters. This is fake, right? Or is that how they get down in North Korea? How would anyone know?

The Seoul-based Korea Times says "only a privileged few" North Koreans, perhaps a few thousand, have unfettered web access. But if you look at this Facebook-produced map of the social network's global usage, you'll see lines extending from the so-called "Hermit Kingdom." Someone, it seems, is accessing Facebook in North Korea even if their home town or current city isn't listed as Pyongyang.

It's hardly surprising that North Korea is web-illiterate. The country started a mobile phone network only in 2002, limited its use to communist party officials, and didn't grant another license until 2008. And as for old-fashioned land lines? A friend and well-traveled photojournalist claims that, while traveling there in the early 1990s, a North Korean businessman handed him a business card with his office number. The number, so the tale goes, was only three digits long.