"Andrea Massaroni has added you as a friend on facebook..."

"Andrea Massaroni has added you as a friend on facebook, before you become friends we must first confirm, that you are in fact, friends with Andrea"

The facebook friend request confirmation e-mail is a familiar one, however when I received this one early last week I was perplexed. I could not, for the life of me figure out who this guy was. So I logged on facebook and viewed his profile to see if I could figure out how I knew him.

Turns out he's a 36 year old Italian man from Rome, Italy. I studied abroad in Rome last spring, but I still did recognize him, so I looked to see if we had mutual friends thinking that maybe people from my program were friends with him and that this would help me place him. Oddly we shared no friends.

Despite all of this I was curious why he all of the sudden decided to friend me, so without accepting his friend request I sent him a message asking how we knew each other.

Within an hour or two I received a response in somewhat broken English: "Hello Martine, we don't know each others.
I organize international social events (parties, aperitifs) and thought that you might be interested in that. -Andrea"

I still have not decided whether or not to accept his friend request. After all knowing about social events in Rome would be cool since I have every intention of going back, however facebook just really does not seem like the forum for such contact. I'd rather be on an email list, or follow him on twitter.

Facebook is a place were both the frontstage and backstage aspects of one's personality are on display. I can't help but feel that this Italian man has no business having access to all of that information about me, even though I do not think that he would do anything bad with that information, I just feel like its weird to allow him to access it at all.

This shows a gap between people's perceptions of the proper use of facebook whether is this case its a geographic or age gap misperception I'm unsure. Overall though the general consensus among people my age is that one uses facebook to connect with people they already know, its not a place to form weak ties, its a place to keep existing weak ties active and to make strong ties stronger.

...Maybe I'll just limited profile him