A new challenge not present when everyone you knew was from your area: How do you know this person?
This has become increasingly true for me. There are several people across the world who I regularly converse with and referring to them in every day conversation with (meatspace) friends and family tends to be full of qualifiers: E.g. "This friend in the US I met over tumblr", or "That guy from the Magic: The Gathering forum."
When talking about people I know "in real life", I don't feel the need to qualify where I met them.
At LW London last week, someone mentioned the possibility of a Google Glass app doing face recognition on people. If you've met someone before, it tells you their name, how you know them, etc. Someone else mentioned that this could reduce the social capital of people who are already good at this.
A third person said that something similar happened when Facebook started telling everyone when everyone else's birthday was. Previously he got points by making an effort to remember, but those points are no longer available.
Are there other social skills that technology has made obsolete? And the reverse question that it only just occured to me to ask, are there social skills that are only useful because of technology?
I'm not really sure what sorts of things I'm looking for here. "Ability to ask for directions" seems like one example, but it feels kind of noncentral to me, I don't know why. But I'm mostly just curious.