If Cinderella were around today, Prince Charming wouldn’t have to track her down by means of a shoe. He’d find her on Facebook in about 10 minutes.
Well, maybe slightly longer, but surely he could locate her within a year. That was the case when 25-year-old Reese McKee of New Zealand met a girl, “Katie” (not her real name) at a party last New Year’s Eve. She told him only her first name and that she lived in Washington, DC. McKee posted a picture of her on Facebook, and invited people to a Facebook event called “a new year’s promise.” More than 4,000 people joined, and they succeeded in tracking her down.
It sounds sweet — until you realize “Katie” didn’t want to be bombarded by so many messages. Rather than forming a relationship, she closed her social media accounts.
Some women in New York agree McKee’s behavior was creepy — and that if someone doesn’t give you their full name or means of contact, they’re not so eager to be “found.”
East Village resident Amanda Proton de la Chapelle says, “To be honest, there have been many New Year’s Eves during which I was so intoxicated, I probably told everything from empty pizza boxes to talkative cab drivers to ‘find me’ later on. I’m still waiting for the empty pizza box to call.” The 35-year-old writer is now happily married to a man she did not demand “find her.”
Experts agree. Says Chiara Atik, the author of “Modern Dating: A Field Guide,” “If you’re using the Internet to track someone down because you don’t know their name, e-mail, or Facebook page, [that’s] not a great sign. Sure, sometimes it’s an honest missed connection. But sometimes the fact that you don’t know their name or have any way of reaching them is a pointed message.”
Even when you do find people on social media networks, you might not necessarily like what you discover.
“I shared a magical night in Paris with an English nanny at a Kilometre Zero art magazine party,” recalls Brendan Jay Sullivan, a 31-year-old DJ from Fort Greene. “I worked at Shakespeare & Co., and we closed the shop at midnight. It was my first time getting drunk on wine, and we passed a bottle around on the way to the party. Helen and I had so much fun. I only knew her name. I remember blogging about her, just hoping she would Google herself. Then, when Facebook came out in 2005, I found her — just before she was to be married.”
He notes that even if you can’t find someone on Facebook, tracking people down via social media isn’t too taxing. “If Juliet had uploaded one of her photos from that night to her Facebook page or Instagram feed, Romeo could drag and drop his copy into Google Image search, and it would likely come up,” he says. “You can do this already on online dating sites where people upload their Facebook pictures.”
Still, some situations can have a happy ending. Mo Pitz, a 37-year-old film writer, says she tracked down a man named Richard on Facebook — the two were camp counselors 20 years ago in Pennsylvania. She always remembered him. “There was definitely a romantic vibe back then,” says the Upper East Sider.
Unlike “Katie,” he was excited to be contacted. After she explained who she was, he exclaimed, “OH MY LORDY LORDY LORD!” before remarking that he still looked at the pictures of the two of them. He now lives in England, but Pitz notes there’s a possibility that she’ll visit.
So sometimes, Mark Zuckerberg does get to act as a fairy godmother. Just don’t count on it.