Social Networking

I sit on a couple of group boards where of late we've been grousing about the flood of social networking requests that have been coming into our in boxes. In a single week, I get requests from Facebook, Spoke, Spock, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc....Most of the of time I wonder, "do I really know all of these people?" or "Didn't I answer a request from this person six times already from all of the other sites? There ought to be a better way. Either you have to indicate how you know the person, or, if you don't know them, you must state why you want to connect. Plaxo and LinkedIn do this to a degree, but it's easy to bypass the qualifiers. I'm not advocating an elitist approach, but there has got to be a better way. I'm as xenophobic/agoraphobic as the next person, but I think maybe picking up the TELEPHONE to actually talk to someone to connect may very well be the next big thing....