[ajleary]

Killing forms usually sounds great, but the familiarity of basic account create is super powerful. Keeping it simple will beat out engagement methods that someone new to your service can't understand.

Out of these examples I think the gradual engagement model is the most compelling and successful. DropBox has done an admirable job with this process that has led to great user growth and a healthy freemium business as well.

[Udo]

It's a very good talk. Sadly, you are right about familiarity. When I left out the "confirm your password 2 times and make sure it's got the following characters blablabla" element, people actually complained because they somehow felt it was insecure or a bug in the program.

On the other hand, signing up via Facebook isn't that great either. If only OpenID had the foresight to include a data repository (at least for preferred username, email, pic, maybe contacts) we could have avoided the mess we see today.