All too much. Make people engage, then engage them again, maybe one more time for the late comers, they'll find the signup.
VCs like registered users, but if you do things right, and make it easy for users to register when they want to, they're an inevitable result of page views.
And to make the fallback path as easy as possible --- just ask the users to use their full email adress as user name.
If they want to sign their comments et al with something other than their username (=their email) - you can provide a nick feature to be configure on the pref's page.
I would agree, but some people aren't keen on giving their email address straight off the bat. You could be poised to spam them with a million emails.
I think username/password, then fill in email etc in profile page, and if they don't fill in their email address, they can't recover their password and will need to create a new account.
Depends on what they're signing up for though - how 'lightweight' is it, does it just store some handy prefs for the app, or does it store credit card details for instance.
I made an e-mail address optional with only a username and password required. The results are almost exactly 50/50 between those who put in an email address and those who do not.
i think we should kill the signup process for most websites anyways. few need it. we are soon launching an email startup and we will not require registration, username or passowrd, and we are still expecting users to login/out securely.
