Hi my name is @dferrari

Hi my name is Deanna @dferrari.
Tomorrow, I’ll be attending my first PodCamp Pittsburgh, where I will meet 500 new social media friends. Sounds dorky, huh?
Actually, PodCamp is a community “UnConference,” run by people and for people who are social media enthusiasts. It’s an opportunity to learn and interact with others about emerging trends in technology, and will be a great learning experience.
In the mix of my 500 new friends will be people I actually know, i.e., I’ve met them in person. These will only be a couple of people, though. The remaining I will only know primarily through Twitter or Facebook. So I’ll walk in knowing a lot of people, right? Well, not actually. I know avatars, and I know Twitter IDs, but when it comes to the people I follow and who follow me, I wouldn’t know them if they walked past me on the street.
These social media conferences and unconferences are funny, really, in that you essentially have to re-learn who people are, since you know them solely based on a photo and 140-character phrases. It’s a cool concept to think people on Twitter are different when you meet them in person. It’s not that they’re fake online (although some may be), but it’s a completely different way of knowing someone. So tomorrow, I won’t be looking at faces, but name tags, to look for these familiar IDs. Taking it one step further, I think we should actually put our Twitter avatars on our name badges, to better recognize each other.
Am I overreacting, or do we need to “re-learn” our Twitter BFFs when we actually meet them?