Who is Robert Knox? Name uses in social services

A Name is an identity one can relate to, respond to, feel empathy to, and have a dialog with.
Web sites have been using their users names in numerous ways to increase their activity’s and emotional relation to their service.
Some of those ways:

• create an emotional connection and empathy.
• Increase user activity and involvement in activities.
• Ownership of information by a specific user within the service.
• Dialog between users.
• CRM - Get the user back to the service using email messages.

Meetup, like many other sites is displaying the user name on the header, with a welcome back statement.
This method is used to create an emotional connection and empathy, The "welcome back" is an empathy statement by the service.
 
The header is a good place for the service emotional connection, placed at the top, aligned to the top, has the logo, display that the dialog is between the user and the service.
Another good use is directing the user to his personal zone within the service - the user profile and account.

Facebook plays the personal name card (sometime too much) in their newsfeed.
In facebook, names are used (among other uses) to increase user activity and involvement in activities.
The idea behind this is simple:
I see what someone is doing, I connect the activity to a person, I relate to the person so I might be also interested in the activity.
In the example above, I know that two of my friends are going to see a concert. there is a much better chance for me going to this concert or taking interest if I know people who are participating in the event - I get a social benefit on top of the activity it self.
Facebook has taken this a bit too far with their "Beacon" advertising platform when they used people identity to promote commercial services and products. 

Ownership of information by a specific user within the service is another use for names and Identities.
In most blogs, You can see clearly who posted the blog post.
But more importantly… 
The ownership of information comes up in the following comments discussion that follows the post.
If I know who the information belongs to I can reply directly to him (see image above) -
Identity of the information owner can create a dialog between users.
Twitter service is basically ’show to all’.
Twitter users had to improvise in order to have a dialog between specific users.
When a twitter member sees "@" + a name other he knows that the information is targeted at someone, and probably is part of a running conversation.
This is a kind of evolution to the old chat rooms.

Digg.com use names in order to get a user back to it’s service (like many others…).

If I see a known name in the message topic I am more likely to open that email, and respond (click on the link) then in a case the message was from the service it self.
I connect the user to the service and the information to the user- this also creates a better customer relationship management (CRM) - The impact is that a dialog is between people and not between a person and mechanical service.
With all that good quality connection, Digg.com did not follow trough.
It took me almost a month to figure out that Robert Knox (name originally belongs to a famous English sailor) is "rtknox00" on the Digg web site.