I don't use FB, but from what I understand can't people who don't know each other interact on a page they both follow, like an organization or a band? And once they've 'met' in that forum, an add or message won't seem so creepy?
If that's the case, why is FB inherently unsuitable for the kind of interaction he's talking about here?
Facebook's actively trying to discourage the sending of friend requests to people a person doesn't know now [1].
I had the feature suspended before, and it even prevented me from sending messages to chat groups where at least one party was not my friend. (I believe one criterion for getting the feature suspended was the number of people who said that they haven't met you before in real life.)
There is a sort of social pressure regarding the number of friends on facebook vs the number of actual friends you have. Adding strangers on facebook is sort of taboo in that it looks like you're just adding random people to boost your stats. I think another reason why the stigma is there comes from the day when the social-casual games were popular (read: zynga). People would add all sorts of strangers to beef up their stats in Farmville or whatever the game du jour was, and it was generally frowned upon
A significant factor is the "newsfeed" behaviour everywhere which discourages continued conversations - posts have a very short visibility decay period.
If that's the case, why is FB inherently unsuitable for the kind of interaction he's talking about here?