By Pete Williams

I’ve always been good with names and faces. It probably comes from collecting baseball cards as a kid, sorting thousands of cardboard photos by name and number. In school, I could hear the roll call on the first day of class and have everyone’s name down cold.

I don’t know if I’ve “monetized” this talent, as we say these days. As a sports journalist, it’s helped me keep the names of thousands of athletes straight. If nothing else I hope it’s saved me the embarrassment of forgetting a name on occasion.

It’s probably just another useless talent, like my encyclopedic knowledge of Richmond Braves baseball and Bob Seger songs.

I recently ran my AOL address book through Facebook, searching for lost friends and contacts. Since I’ve had AOL for 13 years, keeping it through the company’s demise and my move to broadband and a different primary e-mail address, there were hundreds of potential Facebook contacts. I sent friend requests to about two dozen.

One sent back an interesting note:

“Thank you for requesting that I link you as a friend. I’m feeling embarrassed to admit it, but to be honest, I’m having trouble recalling meeting you. It is my personal policy to link as on-line friends only those people that I already know face-to-face in real life. Could you please help me recall our meeting?”

He was right; we had never met in person. But we work in similar fields and have two dozen mutual Facebook friends. Somehow we’ve ended up on each other’s email newsletter lists. I find his newsletter interesting and since he’s never unsubscribed to mine, I assume he reads it on occasion. Since he was in my AOL address book, we must have exchanged personal email at least once over the last 13 years.

But, alas, no face-to-face meeting. I sent back a note summarizing the above and here was his reply:

“Oh, yes, Pete, I do know who you are, but that’s not the same as knowing you personally. We’ve each achieved some level of fame (or infamy) in our own (professional) circles, but since neither of us can recall even meeting one another, it would be too much of a stretch to call us “friends.” Therefore I will respectfully decline your request until we have spent some time getting to know one another face-to-face.”

Fair enough. People use Facebook differently. This guy seems to use Facebook the way many people, myself included, use LinkedIN, accepting only those people as contacts that we’ve done significant business with over the years.

There’s also the danger of stockpiling anonymous friends and creating a “page” that’s not useful for anyone. This is called MySpace.

Admittedly, this is an uncomfortable subject, sort of the professional version of that college quandry where you debate whether to say “hello” to someone in passing. (“Do they remember who I am?”)

But it got me thinking about “face-to-face” friendliness in the modern age. There are people we exchange dozens of e-mails with that we never meet in person. I’ve been a guest on certain radio shows many times and have never met the host or producer in person – even though I’ve spoken to them off air as well.

I’ve sent friend requests to people I’ve heard speak and met afterward, though they no doubt remember me from the flurry of handshakes and brief greetings. Does that count as “face to face?” What about the many people we meet briefly at trade shows and business gatherings?

I get friend requests from people I haven’t met face to face but am thrilled to receive since we have mutual friends and I could benefit professionally from getting to know them. Some are fellow triathletes, runners, or school alumni.

I’ve sent out more than a few of those friend requests, some of which have led to stories I’ve written, guests for my radio show, and helpful training advice.

I went through the first 50 names in my Facebook friends list and found that I had met 44 of them face to face. That’s 88 percent, a figure I thought would be lower. I’d be curious what the ratio is for people with thousands of Facebook friends. I imagine my LinkedIN number would be slightly higher, my Twitter much lower.

This isn’t to say the face-to-face policy of my would-be “friend” is wrong. It’s probably more common than not, though I’ve discovered that people with online platforms like his – or mine – generally are aggressive at building social networks

Then again, with privacy always a concern, it’s amazing so many of us share as much as we do, even with “friends.” There is no right policy for this, of course, other than to wish we could get more face time with our friends

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 11:56 am and is filed under Sports Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.