a question of LJ etiquette

[cellio]

I wonder what the correct behavior is in this situation.

Recently I was having lunch with some people (including a coworker), and I made an off-hand comment about LJ. (This was in the context of wondering what future archaeologists will conclude about us based on email, usenet, etc.) My coworker said something like, "oh, LJ... could be bad". I parsed this as "my coworker is on LJ".

This conclusion turns out to be correct. Given that, and the fact that this is someone whose journal I would find interesting (in a friendly way, not a snoopy way), do I: (a) add the coworker to my friends list, blatantly alerting said coworker to my presence and possibly causing this person to feel self-conscious; (b) read the journal explicitly when I feel like it but don't add to my friends list, possibly causing my coworker to feel stalked if this fact comes to light, or (c) forget about the whole thing?

Comments

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure that a) is wholly blatant, and I think it might be appropriate to be more blatant.

I tend to be extremely forthright, so I would probably send a private message to the coworker saying "What's your LJ userid? I'd like to add you to my friends list." (I might do that even if I already knew their userid, actually. :)

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was going to suggest saying something like, "Hey I'm on LJ too. My username is cellio, what's yours?" Then I would just say "I'd like to add you to my friends list, but I won't do so if it would make you uncomfortable."

That's why LJ can be set up with different security levels. If there's something she doesn't want you to read, she can block you from reading it. I don't see that it would be any sort of faux pas to be direct about it.

What Ralph said...

[prejlog.livejournal.com]

For example, I didn't realize until today that you'd added me to your friends list. Of course, I ma not teh most organized of wombats (nor have I been doing enough LJ the past couple of weeks...)

Re: What Ralph said...

[cellio]

I hope I didn't offend -- and that if it's a problem you'll let me know. You posted in my journal (else I probably wouldn't have bumped into you), so I was curious about who you were and found your journal interesting.

Re: What Ralph said...

[prejlog.livejournal.com]

No, not offended at all. Pleasantly surprised, actually. But as a case in point, it wa s not until I went to my info page for some reason (don't recall now whhy) that I noticed that I had 2 people listed as friends. Don't know how long a lag there was...