The success of social networking sites is of course in their personalisation and you could even go as far to say that the attraction to these sites is that people just like being remembered. Having a personal connection to your experience on a website needs to be easy and often, similarly to real world socialising, people like the connection initiated by someone else.
A website should, again similarly to the real world, initialise the connection to the person viewing in an approachable, but not to overwhelming manner, do the introduction in the form of registration, giving some information as well as request it, and then jump straight into the personalised options for the user. Show them a personalised version of the home page for example.
Once the connection is made between the person and the website, the website needs to than remember that person as best as possible, sometimes you can’t of course. But it should be as easy as, “what was your name again? Oh, that’s right, now I remember! Here’s the stuff we talked about last time”.
