[wtracy]

This is an interesting question that I'd love to hear other opinions on.

My idea that I haven't gotten to implement yet: Make it possible for the user to get started without logging in, then force them to create an account after they've started playing around.

The particular application that I specifically want to try this on is going to be a document-oriented application. I'll let the user jump in and start creating something without creating an account, but then make the user create an account (or log into an existing account) to be able to save their work. If you've already spent even two minutes creating something, having to type in an email address and password seems trivial compared to having to start over again if they want to come back later. (That's the theory, at least.)

The key in my mind is to get the customer invested in the application (even slightly) before forcing them to make an account.

[amikazmi]

I feel exactly the same- let users use and require sing-up for saving data etc.

But for young applications, it is important to get in touch with the users, and try to engage them-

There are some start-ups dedicated only to automatically send users email after some conditions, and most of the service I use do it manually too (like sending you "we noticed that after you built your form you didn't publish it for a month, care to tell us why?")

If you don't know who your users are, how can you get the negative feedback?

Getting feedback only from the people who sign up is going to be skewed to the positive side, and you'll have a problem realying on analythics for guest users (because some "guest users" are can be the same user- from different machine, or after cookie clean)