The beauty of just collecting an email is that you can use that for everything, including a lost password. Since most of my web apps are more private and accoun

The beauty of just collecting an email is that you can use that for everything, including a lost password. Since most of my web apps are more private and account-based without communication among users, I tend to just create the account with an email and password. I am working on a web app though that is more social, and I'm implementing something similar to Hacker News. Create a username and password and you are in.. with the option to set an email for password recovery and display purposes later on.