It turns out, then, for me at least, that reading about someone's cat and what they ate for breakfast and seeing their Flickr photos of the swirls in their coffee and all that adds up to a picture of a person in my mind; not a full likeness, but enough for an actual presence in memory; and with that picture, I associate the things they tell me with them, and remember what they say surprisingly well. Far better than my memory usually works, unattended.
